Apple has released a new iPod that is supposed to set the world, and its stock, on fire. This is the video-capable iPod, a 30 GB version of which will be available for $299. Let’s compare this to the Creative Zen Vision, which came out last month.
- Apple: 2.5″ screen, 320×240 pixels of resolution, 5 ounces, batteries stuck inside the case, $299 at amazon, shipping soon?
- Creative: 3.7″ screen, 640×480 pixels, 8.4 ounces, removable batteries, $399 at amazon, in-stock now
For photographers who want to show off and video fans who just love their TV, the Creative seems like a better value due to its vastly bigger screen and higher resolution. What do folks think? Will adding video to the iPod be any more significant than adding video capture capability has been to little point-and-shoot digicams or cell phones?
Personally I have always preferred the user interface of the Creative MP3 jukeboxes, which have more buttons than their Apple counterparts, and don’t rely on a control wheel so much. Creative’s desktop PC software was rather clunky last I tried it (two years ago) and I prefer simply to sync the player using Windows Media Player.
I think the bigger factor is that following the success of iTunes and now Apples announcement of the content deal with ABC-Disney for video content the ipod will be the default choice for consumers. Just like windows wins because that is what most software is available for the ipod will win because of content.
agree with Colin, also – the Zen seems like a pretty big device – wonder how easily it fits in your pocket.
> batteries stuck inside the case
> removable batteries.
who cares? which device has a longer battery life?
I think you mean 30 Gb, not 30 Mb.
Actually, the Archos makes even better video players. Original video content for portable video players, including the video iPod is very small at the moment. This market has yet to develop and 2.5″ screen isn’t going to be a driving factor. I suspect the initial market for these is still the underground pirated movie collectors who have wmv, divx or DVD rips and can play them on an airplane w/o pulling their laptops or carry home videos to friends and family. That’s why the agnostic Archos seem much better, though they have had crappy user interface. The creative, while good on paper is a horrible device. On the other hand, for photographers who want to show video, the Epson P-2000 is a must, having the best battery life and an awsome screen for photos.
For photographers and people who love their TV, maybe the creative is better. But for people who want to listen to music and *occasionally* watch video or look at photos, the ipod is a clear winner. Its half the weight and smaller. For most people, music is why they buy one of these players. Sure for that vacation flight it’d be great to watch a movie, but most of the time you want your music. For that the ipod is the clear winner.
The “killer app” will probably be the iTunes Music Store, that has content easily available.
Like one of my friends said: “The iPod is not the best music player, but it is the best music player.”
Remember Creative is suing Apple over their patented interface? I recon Creative is after one thing only: a settlement that lets their player work with iTunes and content from the store.
Sony needs to make a video-oriented version of the PSP, with a 30+ GB harddrive. The PSP screen is _far_ superior to that of the video iPod; a 4.3″ widescreen with 24-bit colour (only 260k colours on the iPod!). Rumour has it a harddrive PSP may be released in 2006; let’s hope that’s true. That and a massive improvement on the battery capacity would be welcome – a 3rd party already makes a replacement battery with twice the life, so it’s certainly possible for Sony to do so. They should contract with Maha/Powerex and get the best possible battery technology in there.
Shawn, I think you’re right. It it going to be for the occasional video/tv watchers, but it may be enough to open up the consumer market into portable video content, something Hollywood with their dual mode mindset (tv or big screen) hasn’t quite grasped. I am also thinking of sales people who travel a lot, families, vacation traveler who want to catch up on entertainment. Portable dvd players aren’t quite the solution as they are still too big and clunky, I’ve seen families lug backpack style cases for a cheapo dvd player and lots of discs. It’s this market that really wants a portable video player about the size of the creative with all content on it.
Philip, I can’t see how you prefer the creative interface when they have had one of the worst consumer experiences with their products. It is also the biggest reason why the ipod is such a success, the user interface that made it intuitive to select and play a song from a list of thousands, not the creative brain-dead menu-driven, PC-based interface.
Tim, I think your ideas are the consumer talking, something Sony stopped listening to long time ago. The PSP is clearly a device that could easily become a portable entertainment platform for mass market, but Sony proprietarized (?!) itself out of that market with skillful lockdown of features.
True, but I think a different business model would serve them well. The PSP is widely considered to be a money loser for Sony, to make the profit on the games. Instead, make a PSP with a modular bay where you could insert a UMD drive, a harddrive, or whatever you want, price the thing at $400-500, and make a profit on the base machine, but increase the usability of the product tenfold. You instantly have a MUCH wider market to sell to. Do like Apple (supposedly) does, and get 10% royalties on all PSP accessories (especially the cool stuff that companies that would like to target for that modular bay). They’d be making all sorts of money, especially if they made a decent developer program so folks wouldn’t have to try to hack the firmware to get homebrew stuff running. Someone on Slashdot came up with an idea of how Sony could allow homebrew apps without opening it all the way, but I can’t remember the gist of it right now.
Another great idea would be to invest heavily in Samsung – that super high density NAND flash they’re working on should allow 32GB flash memory sticks within the next year or two; that’d make a great addition to such a system; no moving parts except the buttons. Yum.
Oh, and I just checked on the Zen Vision – it’s display is also limited to 260k colours. Too bad it’s not widescreen; 720×480 is the native resolution of DVD, I think. They came pretty close, but as the saying goes, “God is in the details.”
“More buttons” is not an advantage on an interface.
iPod interface is quirky at first, but wins hand down as it is easy to control with one hand, and that is a big plus.
Having said that, not too enamored with the video iPod. Viewing video on a 2.5″ screen (or even a 3.7″ screen) is just not too nifty for my post 40 eyes…
-“More buttons” is not an advantage on an interface.
Personally, I prefer a 104-key keyboard to tapping out Morse code on a telegrapher’s station, but that cold be a personal preference.
@K:
Yes, but you probably spent a lot of time memorizing where each (most) of those buttons were so you could use it without looking. And you’re using both of your hands. And you’re using it for extended periods of time at a stretch.
With a music/video player it seems to me you want something different. You want something you can manipulate with one hand, maybe reach in a pocket and manipulate without looking, and do so with a minimal learning curve. Under those circumstances, fewer buttons is clearly better, especially if they’re layed out in an intuitive manner.
I think the aim should be on the fact that you can, theoretically, bring your video iPod or Creative video player with you on vacation and with an S-video cable, have a portable TiVo of sorts, bringing your favorite movies / TV shows with you. Of course, first you have to get the content on the video player, which is a major problem. But with the creative, you can easily put every episode of the simpsons on the hard drive and bring it with you. Watching videos / TV on a 2.5″ screen is not going to be pleasant.
It’ll be nearly impossible to tell which player the public “likes” more, because very few people have even heard of the Creative Zen Vision, whereas Steve Jobs’s smiling face next to an iPod video is posted all over the business section of every major newspaper and magazine. But based on the stats, I’d have to say that the creative the better of two things it makes no sense to buy. If you want to watch video, why not just use a laptop? A small, compact device that you can clip onto your belt or fasten to your arm makes sense for music, but not for video… by the time you’re into the expense and bulk of a decent sized screen, you’re dealing with something you carry in a bag and sit down to use… Dell/Lenovo/Sony Laptop: 14″ screen, ~1000X700 pixels, 5lbs, removable battery, $699 (that you have to spend anyway). Then again, Phil comes out ahead by not buying an iBook and dressing in the toughskins with iron on patches that he purchased at Sears in 1977 (i.e., his “straight guy dividend”) 😉
If this first generation of video iPod were too good (in terms of resolution/battery power/capacity/size/price…whatever), how are you going to get millions of people to buy the new improved version that comes out next year? C’mon Philip, we need lots of incremental improvements, just interesting enough to keep this stock (and the million dollars a day profit machine of Apple) going up for years to come. This is the perfect upgrade from the existing models, but plenty of room for improvement. If it were TOO good, the people who just bought iPod Photo or Nano might get annoyed. This is a “just right” kind of product release.
Obviously what everyone wants is the little music player with a big screen, but can’t have both, the laws of physics wont allow it.
The only extra buttons the iPod needs are volume. Or rather, make it a nice old fashoned dial slightly sticking out on top, next to the headphone jack.
Having to wait for the screen to go back to “now playing” before you can adjust the volume or having to take it out of you pocket and unlocking it when all you want to do is turn it down a little is just plain stupid.
For those un-informed about the menu structure of Creative players, it’s the same as Apple’s, as Apple copied it from Creative. You select album/artist/genre and then scroll through the list. There is no difference.
PSP nerds: Thanks for this insight. I’m so far out of the gaming world that I had forgotten that ultimate the gaming consoles can do everything.
Buttonphobes: The most usable devices usually have one button, clearly labeled, for each major function. A P&S camera, for example, will force you to go into menus to change aperture and shutter speed in manual exposure mode; an SLR camera will have one knob for aperture and one for shutter speed. The Sonos Zone Players have Vol+, Vol-, and Mute buttons on the front. The remote control also has these buttons in addition to the wheel and some soft keys. The Creative players that I’ve tried have Vol+/- and pause/play buttons in addition to some sort of wheel. I find those useful. Whenever I have picked up a friend’s iPod, I haven’t been able to figure out how to adjust volume or stop and start the music.
My son has an Ipod with the wheel & four buttons (about two years old). I have to confess that I don’t know how to operate it. But it came with a cable that has a pause/play and volume controls on it, I think it is a standard apple part that was included then.
I do know how to operate that part, so controlling the volume is no problem.
I’m still holding out for FM radio included, so I can get my public radio fix on my motorcycle. But I’m starting to think a Nano would be nice, with my old FM walkman for radio. Or maybe a few more shows will offer podcasts/free archives, then I can skip the FM completely.
Phil: I, an Apple computer fan, bought an iPod mini a couple of months ago. I didn’t find the interface immediately intuitive, and had to consult the manual (which I had already packed away back in the box, not expecting to need it) in order to learn how to do basic functions like volume control and turning the device off.
Once I learned these things, it’s pretty easy to use, but I concur that it wasn’t as obvious as you might think it would be.
$2 for a low-quality version of a TV show you missed last night is worth it when it’s awkward to borrow and return a bad VHS copy from a friend (and maybe cheaper than the gas there and back), and it’s way less hassle than downloading an unreliable torrent for most people. That’s why the iPod will win, even though the Zen and PSP are technically better devices for playback.
Plus it’s still an iPod, and (other than no more FireWire syncing and slightly shorter battery life), is better than the previous hot-selling models for the same money. QED.
I went to dinner at some friends, I wanted to show them some photos I took today and some videos I shot and edited on my vacation. I took along my Apple Mac Powerbook. The screen was much better that either of the two screens you mentioned, and there was no need to “Sync Up” with an inferior remote device like the Creative Zen. At $999 (“reconditioned”) with the ability to attach to a remote DVD burner that I already own, I consider the Apple Powerbook to be a superior value to the two devices you mentioned in your review. (And, the Powerbook battery is not “stuck inside,” it can be replaced at any time, not that I have yet had occasion to do so)
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The new iPod isn’t really a true PMP like the Zen Vision, it’s a music player with pretty average video capabilities added on, it’s purpose is to test the market so Apple can decide whether or not to come out with a true PMP later. The new 30GB iPod will only support H.264 & MPEG4 playback with limited resolution (I believe 480×480 for MPEG4 and 320×240 with H264), with less than 2 hours of battery life playing video. This makes it useful for people who mainly want to listen to music and just want to be able to occasionaly watch a video they downloaded from iTunes. If you want a video player, to play TV shows you recorded, movies you download (usually illegally), or DVD s you ripped, you’d want an actual video player like the Zen Vision or Archos AV500, which play back DIVX & XVID (common codecs when ripping DVDs) and have larger screens. The AV500 also has the added feature of being a portable video recorder, so you could record directly from TV into the device, of course this comes with a higher price tag. To the people talking about laptops, the point of these portable players is to have something you can carry around in your pocket, of course not everyone has a need for them, but you can’t really compare them to a laptop.
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I totally agree with Jason.
The 5G iPod is a way for Apple to experiment with this market, which is very small at the moment. By adding video as an ‘extra’, Apple gets to vastly expand the potential market in the same way as they did with podcasts.
Taking a step back, think about what a new company would need to do to expand the portable video device market. They would need to (a) sell a device at a cheap enough price point to a lot of consumers, and (b) offer a way of getting content onto it quickly and cheaply. At the moment, there are no devices that are cheap enough and good enough at (a) to sell in large quantities. From the limited number of Archos devices that have been sold, it is also true to deduce that most consumers do not seem interested in a device that can record content from TV (at least for the moment).
The Apple strategy means that they can introduce a large market segment to video, and entice them to buy TV content. If they prove successful, they will have simultaneously grown a new, potentially very large and lucrative, market at the same time as locking these same consumers into their proprietary FairPlay DRM.
I think the missing word here is Cool!
The Apple is cool and that’s what kids want. No self repecting teenager would be seen without anything other than an iPod. That’s the real factor here.
I agree Apple has set the trend. Admittedly most of these players are just glorified hard drives, but I think healthy competition is good competition. I hope the promised iPod phone changes the market and makes us jump forward in trying to catch up with Japan.