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Another Zune? So soon?
You can't accuse Microsoft of giving up on a bad idea too quickly, so the never-popular Zune is about to become part of an expanded range of unloved music players gathering dust in an unvisited back-of-store display in Best Buys. The new players will have bigger screens, apparently, meaning the horrible navigation tool will be even smaller than on the current model.
Such is the confidence of Microsoft in their music player, they've still not given an official launch date for the product in the UK as far as we can see. The smart money is on them not bothering.
4 comments:
Dude, have you ever actually used one? They rule!
Yes, I have.
No, no they don't. They're like a Pound Shop iPod.
MS often pushes its business divisions to prove themselves in the market particularly after a period of investment. I've seen this several times in my time at MS. So it is of no surprise to me that the current Zune is only available in North America and that there is another model on the way. The current Zune is clearly a market test - prove yourself - having been a pretty good spec it has ticked many of the required boxes for continued investment (I think, no insider knowledge here). some of the concepts like Wifi sharing openly between strangers IS really cool and great fun. All sorts of fun social options start opening up ;-)
The rest of the world will get Zune 2.0 and you can bet it'll be well worth the wait.
Has the Zune proved itself in the market place, though? Being poked in the back of so many stores made it look a bit like the wheezing kid sitting on the sideline with matron in the music player world; the wireless sharing thing is a neat idea, but was hardly an innovation - your average purchaser couldn't care less for the protocol distinction between wifi and bluetooth for sharing files wirelessly - and had such a clunky application (three songs, played once, shared twice... no, hang about, you can share any song, but only once it's been played three times... no, no, three...) and by being tied into Zune was fatally flawed - what are the odds of two zunes being in the same place at the same time? Even the displays in the stores could only muster one to play with, and a non-working example.
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