Microsoft leaks Zune Details in FCC filing 274
cnet-declan writes "One of my colleagues at CNET News.com has picked up on a filing that Microsoft made yesterday with the FCC. Our article reports that Microsoft's Zune media player (the iPod rival discussed before on Slashdot) is going to have features such as creating mobile social networks and streaming music to nearby friends or strangers. It's going to support the 802.11b and 802.11g wireless standards, have a 30GB hard drive, support music, movies, and photos, and have a 3-inch screen. Is this finally enough to unseat Apple?"
no thanks (Score:2, Interesting)
because someone sent me a virus masquerading as an audio file.
I'm assuming of course that this MS device will be running MS software, and be subject to all the
nasty goodies that windows brings home from the network.
Perhaps not as social as the summary suggests. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Microsoft's Zune media player is going to have features such as creating mobile social networks and streaming music to nearby friends or strangers"
I thought, how on earth will MS get away with allowing people to share music with one another, given the way they've bowed to industry pressure regarding HDCP on 32-bit Vista? Then I read the article, which only mentions "promotional copies of songs, albums and playlists,". This is hardly the same thing as unfettered sharing, and seems pretty limiting... practically pointless, IMHO.
"Is this finally enough to unseat Apple?" (Score:3, Interesting)
Along another train of thought... I guess this is what the MS patent posted earlier today is all about... controlling who uses up the bandwidth on your device when social networking.
Thinking along these lines... what MS REALLY needs to do is to create a way for the devices to share music with each other; first 30 secs are free... if someone wants to copy the entire song over, MS bills their credit card, and the person gets a DRMed copy of the song locked to their device.
Try "anti-social" (Score:4, Interesting)
I see a new business, though: Set up a wifi base with a fair amount of power. Send ads to everybody who passes with a Zune. Yeah, I can see it already. No, that doesn't make me want a Zune over an iPod. I get enough advertising in my day already, thanks.
Wireless? Colour me afraid (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like a recipe for viruses and malware to me. How about people setting broadcast hotspots to spew advertisement at your device should it become popular?
Re:missing the social point (Score:5, Interesting)
Who, for the vast majority, never ever utter a single word to their fellow commuters unless they're friends already. It's a sad fact that a universal constant on buses, trains, tubes, and metros the world over is everyone travelling in deathly silence from the moment they board until the moment they alight at their destination.
If Microsoft can make people strike up conversations with the strangers around them they don't deserve a business success with the Zune, they deserve the next 100 Nobel Peace Prizes.
Re:Itunes baby Itunes not hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
No. The artificial reliance on iTunes is the iPod's biggest drawback. See, I can state opinions as fact too!
802.11b (Score:3, Interesting)
Why support the now quite obsolete 802.11b standard, unless that support isn't already automatically incorporated into the 802.11g standard? Are there tons of 802.11b standard MP3 players already running around out there that Zune needs to be compatible with?
And if 802.11b standard support is part of the 802.11g standard, then why bother to mention it separately?
And if you don't enable WAP on your connection, will the RIAA sue you for filesharing un-DRMed music?
Microsoft is Fighting the Last War (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what Microsoft is doing here. This might have been enough to defeat the Video iPod, but that was the last device. This will - at most - be on par with Apple's new offering, and probably beat by it. It looks like Apple's new iPod will have an even bigger screen than this, by moving the touchpad to the back. That plus WiFi will probably be enough to keep this at bay, not to mention any other extra features Apple might add.
Overall, there is no clear "killer app" that makes me think this will be successful. The Zune looks fully competent, but you need more than competence to defeat a de facto standard. I don't know about you, but the prospect of being able to borrow a song from a friend for a day before it is cancelled provided we are both using Zunes doesn't get me very excited. Nor do I have any desire to beam random files to strangers. The ability to work with social networks might be cool but there are no details on that, and I'm not going to get my hopes up.
There is of course an easier way to defeat a de facto standard - beat them on price. If this were offered for a very low price, for example $150 or $200 for a 30GB model, they would steal a lot of market share from Apple and make up the money with future models once people warmed to their product. That's why companies call them "entry models." But they are charging $300 for this, so there is no monetary reason for anybody to take a "step down" from the iPod, which is the way any non-iPod device is currently perceived, fair or not.
No way I want one of these (Score:3, Interesting)
With the way Micro$oft sets defaults on security issues, these things will be shipped wide open. Your music will be interrupted by "Drive-by" spam. Every major box store will be streaming commercials to these poor wretches.
And when the script kiddies get a hold of it, millions of portable zombie-bots! Blue screen of death right in the middle of your jam session.
Forget trying escape in your car from the loud bass in the car next door. Thanks to this gizmo, they can beam it to your Zune!
And think, you can broadcast your kiddie pron to all the highschool cuties. The predators rejoyce!
No thanks, Redmond.
Re:Itunes baby Itunes not hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course PC users have Windows Media Player, RealPlayer and other services to choose from. The difference is that Microsoft's option, oddly enough, offers more options when it comes to music stores. You can use Napster, Rhapsody, Surge, Wal-Mart's music store and others.
I don't own an iPod, so I'd be more likely to buy a "Zune" because I'm not going to be limited to iTunes only. (And I'm no MS fanboi, but what works, works.) Sadly, Zune will offer more options.
oh, really fool? (Score:2, Interesting)
A device only needs to do one thing well in order for it to be accepted. Just like the wizard on Sienfeld. It's a "tip calculatior", "but it does other things". My customer bart has a computer, just becuase he wants to email his sister. Thats it. He had no interest in surfing the web, playing games or music with it. He just uses it to send emails. The extra features of a device really don't matter to anyone EXCEPT the early adopters and reviewers. If you were to give it as a gift to a "normal" person, they wouldn't care how good or bad the extra features are they won't even try to use them.
Re:I may want one of these after all (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows differs from my setup (which is clearly perfect) in a few ways. First, it uses alt-tab, whereas I use mod4+tab for consistency (and my keyboard's two meta keys are each bigger than its one alt key anyhow). Second, it brings up the Start menu when you tap the Windows key, which is the part that's pure evil. IMHO modifier keys should strictly be modifier keys. This also goes for alt (compare, say, GTK+'s alt behavior with that of most Win32 programs).
But the overriding point is that Microsoft hardware doesn't really have much to do with the Windows key. Unix vendors and also Apple have had similar keys long before Microsoft introduced theirs (though Apple's key is also the primary key used for app bindings). And IMO its failings have entirely to do with software. If you want to disable it in Windows there's a registry hack to do that, which can be found by searching the wb if you're lucky.
Think XBox (Score:4, Interesting)
As regards iPod - personally, I carry a Pocket PC - it basically matches the specs of the Zune (except I have an SD card instead of a 30GB hard drive). It is my music player (mp3s and downloaded Yahoo Music WMAs), my PDA, my portable gaming machine and my mobile internet appliance. And I have had it for 2 years now. Battery life is phenomenal (I easily get a week on a charge). Now, that said, I bought iPod Nanos for my kids. They are the cool thing to have right now. However, cool with the younger set is a fleeting thing
Re:Heck No (Score:3, Interesting)
the difference between an ipod and a dvd player, for example, is that a dvd player has fixed specifications, i.e. "play dvds", and dvd players built 5 years apart do this pretty much exactly the same.
music players are composed of many hi-tech components (TFTs, small hard drives) which tend to improve in quality rather than decrease in price. the 5G ipod costs about the same as a 1G ipod but with better components. and I don't see any companies having great success by making cheap 1G ipod knockoffs in the present.
M$ version of sharing has not changed. (Score:3, Interesting)
with my laptop I could flood all the nearby Zunes with goatse images.
I doubt you will be able to send anything to them or that they will be able to send anything to anyone else. The last hype article noticed that content "shared" between devices would disappear in a day or two. Getting around that would be a DMCA violation, M$ would happily punish you for. You can bet this device will use a "new and improved" Windoze Media format that will take all sorts of time to figure out and ultimately not be worth the effort.
We'll see what this thing really does, but my bet is that it will be a big DRM suck hole filled with adverts and disappearing content. That's what M$ has tried to force through every one of it's previous music services. I predict a device with Windoze Mobile battery life and stability combined with suck deal of (P)Urge, the featureless facade of WiMP, and Windoze lack of security. It's hard to tell if the ultimate limiting factor will be DRM shortened battery life or uptime.
I'll stick to my four year old Zaurus with GPE that plays mp3, ogg, gstreamed movies and everything else supported by Xine in addition to a choice of window managers, web browsers and normal PDA software.
Zune might not display your images but is will blow goats.
Re:Nothing can 'unseat Apple' in the near term (Score:1, Interesting)
Not to worry though. The 80s and early 90s will always be more embarrassing than now.
Re:802.11b (Score:1, Interesting)