Posts Tagged ‘Zune’

Touché

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

I’m actually typing this on iPod touch, and just like everybody else I’m impressed. It’s so easy to do so much with it. I’m blown away by what could be possible if I had more then my wifi network. No wonder the iPhone is so popular.

Flying cars would have flown themselves. Duh.

But I don’t think it’s enough for me to get one on my own. (This is a loaner)

At the moment I’m pretty committed to moving away from closed systems. So I’m running Ubuntu on my laptop and have serious plans to move to Songbird. Which means goodbye App Store. Which completely squanders the point of the Touch.

So which DAP to get? The iPod mini I’ve inherited from Anita has no battery life left and I’ve got to choose.

Shuffle isn’t enough for me, I want more control. Nano is nice but I’ve never been huge fan of the click-wheel. I would love a Zune but Microsoft changed the protocol from the standard and it can’t work with Songbird. (And the new ZunePass is amazing, I thought it was a good value before but now its the only thing that makes sense. Not that it’ll be coming to Ubuntu or Songbird.)

I think I’m stuck with waiting for Songbird 1.0 and see what works best with that. I’m guessing a Sansa.

But man am I loving this Touch. This is what a PocketPC was suppose to be. I can check my email, Facebook and the web from the couch with Presto laying on top of me. He does that with the laptop too, but this is lot more comfortable for both of us.  (But don’t believe the hype about the the typing on the keyboard, it ain’t that great, so I’m finishing this on a real keyboard.)

Cell service with data plans are still crazy expensive in Canada so Android and the G1 will not be a magic bullet. But maybe someone will port it to a device like this. Hummmm…. Putting Android on an iPod touch… I enjoy that just for the sacrilege alone.

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Phatty+

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

I picked up Anita one of the new iPod nano‘s. The 3rd generation is lovingly referred to as the ‘Phatty’ due to it’s wider and shorter stature.

Honestly, it’s pretty wicked. The screen is sharp and the whole unit is hella light.

But there’s only one real reason I bothered giving Apple more money. The Nike+ Sport Kit. Anita’s been trying to get back into jogging and I think this might help. (Or at the very least can’t hurt.)

The other MP3 players on the market are actually of a better value. The Zune looks great with FM receiver built in, no add-on needed. But it doesn’t have the Nike+. (And it’s not on sale in Canada… but I digress.)

This also means her mini gets redeployed into my grubby hands. :) This is my first time dealing with a real iPod. My shuffle doesn’t really count. And I’ve already set the ratings on a good 50 songs. No being chained to the keyboard for it. Yay!

What I really want is to create a dynamic playlist which will constantly swap the songs on it. I have over 17,000 tracks (That’s +100 Gigs) and they’re not all going to fit on the little 1st gen mini. I’m probably doing something wrong, but if iTunes is really that great, I would hope it would be a little more straight forward. I’ll have to see if I can get the time to do some more research into it later.

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