iPod vs. Zune

This is an interesting article from a current iPod owner on why he will switch to a Zune when microsoft releases the device.

What I find most amusing about this, is that a lot of his complaints are a large portion of why I chose not to buy another Sony music player. SonicStage had all of the same problems that this guy complains about with iTunes. It was cumbersome, image heavy, took forever to convert things and periodically, for whatever random reason, chose to delete files from my music collection when I would burn them to minidisc. It was never a whole album either, and never all of the songs that I’d transferred onto one particular disc in one sitting, so I wouldn’t call it a user error. Also, when my hard drive went belly up, I had no way to get those songs back off of the minidisc and onto my hard drive again.

What I quickly found out, is that this is simply life living with tunes that have been crippled with DRM. This is not what I want as a consumer. I want the ability to put it on my player, take it back off and not lose the music that I’ve paid for. My solution to the SonicStage problem was to buy hard copies, rip them and then transfer them to my player. This way I am guaranteed that I won’t lose my entire music collection from a single hard drive failure, and have the ability to restore the music– that I paid to have the right to listen to– on that machine.

Also, he’s right, it’s cheaper to buy CDs, particularly when your music tastes tend to not include Ashlee Simpson or Christina Aguilera. I’m not a pop music kind of girl. I stopped being a pop music kind of girl when I was 12. Can we please grow up the available music selection to things that stretch outside of American pop culture? I know this stuff sells, but the other stuff will sell too and how hard would it be to carry the more obscure tunes realistically when each one only takes up a few megabytes of hard drive space? I’m not expecting iTunes to carry j-pop, but it would be nice to be able to find something that doesn’t make me feel the need to crack my gum when I listen to it.

Dude, your dell just blew up!

This concerns me and I’m posting this here for the benefit of any of my readers who might own a Dell laptop. A dell laptop battery exploded at a conference in Japan a few months ago, and now this one exploded in an office building.

We all love our laptops, and as any good gadget geek will tell you, the laptop is the essence of life, however there is no excuse for letting the laptop take your life. I can’t advise you on what steps to take to resolve this, because Dell has not apparently announced a recall on their laptop batteries, but if you are a dell owner, you should check their website to find out if they have any information on this and see if your laptop is safe.

Why I didn’t jump on the iPod bandwagon.

Recently in an online chat channel, I made a confession that I own a creative zen micro. The reaction I got to this surprised me. “I can’t believe it. Isn’t each state only allowed to have one zen owner?”

The next morning the news articles started coming out with rumors of Microsoft’s “Zune” player and those articles put Apple’s share of the mp3 player market at 80% of all mp3 players owned. It made me think hard about why people wanted an iPod, and why I didn’t choose to get one.

The biggest reason is probably that I already owned a Sony PSP. The PSP is a supreme device for watching portable video on, with great sound and even better video. The video iPod did not tempt me with its small screen and sound quality that true audiophiles rate as being not bad, but not all that, even with high quality headphones. So when I went looking for a device, I didn’t need an all-in-one. I had the PSP for that, the only complaint I had with the PSP is that it’s almost too bulky to be portable for someone who wants music on the go, and the remote is poorly designed for a driver to mess with while operating a vehicle.

I needed something that fit in my pocket with clean menus that you could navigate at a stoplight without having to dig six layers deep and push numerous buttons. That’s when I started looking at the other music only players on the market.

First, I took a long hard look at the iRiver H10. It’s a nice player, loaded with features and has a color display. Great sound quality, nice player. But after playing with the device at an electronics superstore I found that I hated the slide bar navigation. It was difficult to use because the device did not fit comfortably in my hand. I have small hands. I even had to buy my own separate controller for our PS2 because the standard PS2 controllers were too bulky and made my hands hurt. The other thing that turned me off of this player was the price. 300$ is a chunk of change for a portable music device that I could easily lose. I wanted to spend less than 200$. This meant that I had to look at players that sported less than 20 gig hard drives, which was fine by me. I didn’t need 20 gig of portable music on me at all times anyway. That’s when I started looking at the iPod.

The reviews of the iPod had some info in them that really turned me off. Shipping the entire unit back to Apple and paying 59$ to have the battery replaced when it started to flake out (and they do flake out after about a year) by Apple wasn’t something that made me happy. Especially since I’d been able to buy replacement lithium ion batteries for my cell phone ever since I bought my first one. This seemed like a raw deal designed only to get more money out of consumers on Apple’s part and in my opinion was a low blow. Especially since it was possible to design the device with a battery compartment that was separate from Apple’s precious DRM technology.

Since portability was important and video wasn’t something I was interested in, I looked at the iPod nano. At the time, Apple had just discontinued the mini, which might have been a great fit for me, but I wasn’t about to purchase one off eBay without a warranty. The iPod nano seemed like it would have been perfect. I carry small purses, the nano fits well with my need to carry impossibly tiny hand bags. I had nearly decided that I wanted one of these cute little devices when I started reading up on iTunes.

The iTunes software is proprietary. Good for it, I kind of figured on that. What I didn’t figure on was that I would have to suffer through software that was nearly as bad as Sony’s SonicStage for its line of digital media devices. No drag and drop file transfer, all transfer would be through iTunes only, and heaven forbid that I ever had a hard drive failure… if the hard drive on my laptop ever failed then I would lose every song I’d ever downloaded from iTunes and the minute I plugged my iPod into a computer with a newly installed iTunes, all of my music would go away. I don’t know that this is still true of iTunes, but it was at the time that I was looking at mp3 players. Every computer I have ever owned has had a major hard drive failure in the course of its life, including the one I am using now.

All of this is well and good, but there were three final strokes that explained to me that I just didn’t need an iPod. The first, was the audio-phile frequency ratings on the iPod and the zen micro. The zen micro has a wider frequency range than the iPod, which means better sound quality over all. The final stroke… is that iTunes does not sell Japanese Pop Music. I’ve looked through their catalog, I haven’t found Gackt or Hyde or Boom Boom Sattelites or any of the music that I listen to on a regular basis. So either way, I’m stuck importing CDs from Japan.

The last stroke was the price. My zen micro was 169$ for a 6 gig player. The 2 gig iPod nano is currently 179$.

Do the math.

Wii vs. PS3

Many have looked at the impending console war for the next-gen machines and concluded that it would be a battle between Sony and Microsoft. So many people have discounted Nintendo’s contribution as irrelevant that I think they all need to take a look at this.

The wait in line to play a PS3 at E3 is thirty minutes. The wait to play Nintendo’s new console (ridiculously named, the “Wii”) is three hours. According to the above article, people are walking away from the Wii impressed.

So here’s my take. Nintendo’s name for the console is stupid, I can’t argue that and I won’t even try. I liked “Revolution” much better. However, their main goal with this console was to get it into the hands of everyone, both gamers and non-gamers and give everyone a fun gaming experience. They’ve hit their target dead-center.

I will probably buy a PS3, mostly because I want to get my hands on Lair and it’s a cheap entrance into the world of Hi-Def DVD compared to how much the initial stand-alone blu-ray players are going to cost. The Wii will not have the power of a PS3 in terms of its components, but I might just buy one because it’s going to be incredibly cheap (200$ is the number the geek-pundits are kicking around) and because the games look like they are going to be tons of fun to play.

Anyone who has ever watched the console wars knows that it’s the games that make or break a system. If the title power is not there to back up a console, the console will not sell.

Looks to me like Sony and Microsoft both are going to be spending a lot of time watching Nintendo’s dust.

I call bull****!

Since Sony’s press conference yesterday with regard to the PS3, every major news network on the planet has been reporting a delay in the release. The problem with this is, there is a delay, but not for the North American market. Sony never promised the North American release of the PS3 before November of this year. Not once, ever. I dare you to find an article to prove it.

Sony had announced that the PS3 would be ready for Japan “some time in late spring of 2006 with a worldwide release following it some time in the late fall.” If those aren’t the exact words of their statement, they are incredibly close. We weren’t going to see it before Christmas anyway.

Just had to share.

Music

Yesterday, I had all of my homework done, so I went out with Angel and wandered about town with her. On the way to drop her off, we picked up my son and introduced him to “My Chemical Romance” a punk-ish band that’s been tearing up the music scene for the last year.

Knowing that my son really likes Green Day, I figured it was a good idea to go out and dig up some more bands for him to listen to. I’ve only recently learned that my son has musical tastes similar to my own. For anyone who has never ridden in my car, you should know that my musical tastes range far and wide and lean toward the obscure. I love anything that could even be remotely construed as rock, yes that includes some pop music. I’m still a huge fan of U2 and have been for as long as I can recall listening to music. My current obsessions are My Chemical Romance and Gorillaz (a hip hop-ish pop band out of the UK). That said, I also enjoy The Stones and The Beatles (you should be proud Dad!). I was a Metallica fan for quite a while, and have a soft place in my heart for Def Leppard. I also really like Nickelback and Natacha Atlas’s work apart from Transglobal Underground which sounds a lot like Egyptian pop music and is sung in Arabic. In the same breath that I admit liking Egyptian pop, I have to confess a secret love for solid Industrial, my personal favorite will always be KMFDM and call me a conformist if you will, but my favorite song is “Juke Joint Jezebel” which is closely followed by “Inane” because that’s one of my favorite words. Tossed all through these heart-pounding bass lines and groovy dance beats is a smattering of old school punk (The Cure back in their punk days, “Standing on a beach with a gun in my hand, staring at the sea, staring at the sand..”, and The Ramones) and a love for contemporary punk. I admit it, I’m a Green Day fan as well. So MCR was a natural fit for my son, as natural as it can be. You see, he likes all of the above stuff too. There are only two bands that I love that my son doesn’t. He doesn’t like U2 (but he does like Coldplay. Score!) and he doesn’t like Gackt-sama. But our favorite Japanese pop band is Asian Kung-Fu Generation.

Angel suggested The Ramones as another alternative for my son, and I wondered why that hadn’t occured to me. The Ramones are good choice for him and I think that anyone who has ever sung along to “Rock and Roll High School” should be proud that I am about to introduce my son to old school punk.

I’ve given this whole thing a lot of thought. There is no reason that my son shouldn’t be able to listen to whatever music I listen to. He’s ready to broaden his horizons even more, because the more music he loves, the more unique his own style will become. My parents were never shy about sharing their music with me when I was younger. My mom and I stole copies of U2′s album “Achtung Baby” from each other until I moved out. I borrowed my Dad’s Beatles’ tapes more than once. As a result, I’m incredibly open-minded about music. I will listen to anything once…

… unless it involves a exes living in Texas.

Now to track down copies of American Idiot and Hey Ho Let’s Go!

Madly in Love With My Naked Zen!

The Naked Zen, as it is coming to be called around my house, has been loaded up with some music. Most of it is stuff I’ve been meaning to listen to, but hadn’t gotten around to listening to. On that list are the following bands: My Chemical Romance, Harvey Danger, Howie Day, James Blunt and Ryan Cabrera.

Just a brief review here, Harvey Danger is really interesting and unique. I referenced them on my blog a while back. They are the band that released their album, “Little by Little” via BitTorrent, as an experiment. They are heavily influenced by several 60′s greats.. and their lead vocalist sounds, at times, like Ozzy Osbourne. Now, on the surface this seems like a bad combination, but it’s actually very cool. I’m enjoying them. As soon as I finish the album, I’ll have to pick it up from them. Howie Day, known for “Collide”, has a good mix of tunes on the album, “Stop All The World”. Damn good stuff. My Chemical Romance is two discs worth of witty, clever and sometimes funny songs. I’m not sure I like them as much as the first two bands, but they are definitely worthy of a listen.

Aside from all that, the more I listen to the nakedzen, the more I love it. Real stereo sound… and all sorts of… well.. cool stuff! Making playlists is easy.. doing just about everything with it is easy. It’s an incredibly user friendly piece of equipment, it’s small, it’s highly portable. What’s not to love?

Hopefully later, hubby and I will put together a way for me to port my playlist over to a sidebar on my blog, so you can see what I am listening to on a semi-daily basis.

Bragging Rights

So… my husband got me a Creative Zen Micro for Christmas. It’s the 6 gig model.

It makes my minidisc player sound like crap. The sound quality, even across the same wireless transmitter I used for my MD player… is superb. The player is cute.

Unfortunately.. when I received it, it was rather naked.

Luckily, my husband and mother conspired to put together some wonderful new outfits for my zen micro. Hand crocheted by Mom.

This outfit gives the zen a sleek, classic look that will never go out of style and is perfect for nearly every occassion.

This designer gown really has it all. Silver, sparkles and an elegant look that is timeless and perfect for any formal occassion.

This little number goes great with jeans and is perfect for those fun evenings out on the town with the girls, or for a cool fall day at the park with someone special.

Merry Christmas!

Update: Just a brief note. Today I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my zen when I wasn’t wearing an outfit that had beltloops or pockets (most women’s dresses and skirts are designed without pockets or beltloops). I came up with a brief, but semi-embarassing solution of stuffing the zen in my cleavage. It worked rather well and was far more comfortable than attempting to find a location for a minidisc player. However, since I have kids, I remembered that mom also gave me a proper zen case that has a lanyard. I’ll be using the lanyard instead. *grin*

Xbox 360 Is Not All That

At least, not in Japan. We knew the Xbox 360 wasn’t selling in Japan. What’s worse is that the PS2 and the Gamecube are outselling it. None of the games for the Xbox 360 have even made the top ten holiday sales for Japan. The Xbox 360 is doing so poorly in Japan that I have to wonder if Microsoft should have bothered to make a showing in Japan at all.

Sure, the Japanese market is huge, but it is also Sony’s playground. Coming to market in Japan with only 9 games available for your system is tantamount to professional suicide when there are literally thousands of titles available for the PS2 and the gamecube over there. Developers in Japan nearly flood the market with titles to see what sells well there, then they ship what actually makes money to the US. That’s how they test market for North America, because if it will sell like wildfire in Japan, it will sell like wildfire everywhere.

Microsoft should have known this before they went to market with the Xbox 360 and accounted for that fact by having more than a meager pile of games for their system. Microsoft, whoever made that stupid decision needs to be fired. They just lost you the second largest video game market in the world.

In other news, the PS3 IS going to be all that.

Apple Swapping

And I have to admit that I have been tempted to do it myself.

The new macs are awfully sweet, not to mention the fact that they are really designed with someone like me in mind. I’m a style fiend when it comes to my electronics. I’ve been holding off on an mp3 player for many reasons, but the biggest one is probably that nothing is quite as attractive to me as an iPod, but I don’t want to have to install or deal with iTunes. I want drag and drop file transfer, and when I get that in a player with as much style as a sony device or an iPod, then I might get something that’s smaller than my PSP. Until then, the PSP serves the purpose well.

Still.. a million converts. That’s a hell of a thing. Kudos to Apple for managing it, and well… I hope some Microsoft execs are using this as an opportunity to take stock.