Another killer is that if you have somebody streaming songs from your player wirelessly while you're listening to your own, the hard drive will be pulling and caching twice the data, thus causing even more battery drain (on top of the added cost of the WiFi).
Without better batteries, this feature won't be worth much more than its novelty.
In my personal opinion, the next iPod won't have WiFi. I don't think the market is ready for it yet. Maybe the other players can pave the way for it while being total flops themselves. Then the iPod can come in at the opportune time and offer an innovative solution the other's weren't offering.
But the biggest reason, is that it's NOT like the cell phone network. You need to be in a hotspot for it to work. And there's simply not a lot of those at the moment. And some, you still have to pay for. And those you DON'T have to pay for, there's a welcome screen that loads in your browser and makes you accept terms of use before giving access. Obviously meant for a computer. How do the current WiFi devices work around that? Does anyone know?
Well, the PSP has a browser built-in... so that's how it connects to hotspots that require the user to agree to terms. I doubt an mp3 player will have a browser built in.
Bluetooth 2.0 won't be low power, if and when it ever comes out to spec.
There has been tremendous effort to get ever lower power on Wifi devices, and this usually focuses on the MAC side of things. There are some Wifi products out there that have extremely low power consumption during idle periods, but there's really no way to decrease power usage all that much when the radio needs to be on. This is common of all massively-broadband technologies, a group in which Bluetooth EDR and WirelessUSB are both members.
The best part about all this Zune business is that Apple has been smiling the whole way. It's either foolish exuberance or a sign that they're about to drop a bomb.
Bluetooth 2 has lower power requirements than WiFi does, though I don't have the numbers here right now. But, even ver. 1 is good enough to transfer music files realtime.
The only way I can see wireless being of any huge benefit is to share your currently playing tune with someone nearby, in real time. They can only hear it - it isn't saved in the eavesdropping player. No way will the labels allow copying music from one device to the other. No way in hell. This realtime sharing could be feasible if done via BT. It's fairly low power and has an acceptable range for that purpose.
As far as Wi-Fi goes, as others have said, the drawback is the scarcity of hot spots and the fact that at home you're already close to your computer so wi-fi wouldn't be such an advantage.
One of the reasons why I didn't buy the HTC 6700 phone was because the WiFi used up so much battery power, that reviewers, and users, said that they just kept it turned off. If you keep it turned off, what's the point? The talk battery life with it turned off is about 4+ hours. With it on, if you get one hour, good luck. I bought the Treo 700p when it came out. The other reason I didn't buy it is because windows mobile 5 still sucks power itself, and it's slow, and crashes too much.
If any of that is on this new product, they will be a problem for MS to overcome. Remembering to switch WiFi on and off again was such a problem for users of the phone to remember, that a number of people turned it in to their providers for other phones.
I don't think that's such a problem as you're only likely to switch WiFi on in a place you know there is WiFi. The problem is that people are dumb f*cks and expect to leave it on all the time. Unless you live within a permanent hotspot I don't see the point.
The Zune is supposedly coming with a 400Mhz CPU. Windows Mobile phones suck not just because of the OS but also because they require a fast CPU to get reasonable performance. Do anything and it kills battery life.
Palm is much better but it's still expensive power wise. They win mostly because they've not updated the OS since it's Dragonball 68K origins and basically even though you're running an emulator on an underclocked low speed ARM processor, the old 68K code runs quite well. That's because their phones do f*ck all and their software is 3-4 years behind the times.
Both systems rely on a discrete CPU and a separate radio stack for comms. That's at least two major chips in the phone with big power requirements. This is just not compatible with modern expectations of a phone from either consumers or manufacturers.
On the right side of the fence you've got Symbian (Nokia and Sony Ericsson mostly) running this year with very low speed, low power ARM CPUs with the comms stack built on the chip for a single chip solution with a very efficient OS. WINCE and Palm will be eaten up this year. I'm pretty sure Apple didn't enter the market with an iPhone this year because it would be absolutely pointless coming out with a smartphone which wasn't based on a single chip solution. Apple isn't stupid. They have to get it right first time.
Apple runs a dual core ARM CPU at sub 100Mhz IIRC in their iPods with a couple of ancillary chips to handle music/video codecs. It's in the same shitty position as MS and Palm for power with too many chips. It only works well in the iPod because it's not required to do anything complex and the chips are idling most of the time. They need to reduce the chip count but the overall power requirements is probably about a quarter of the Zune or any PDA (Palm or WINCE) and maybe a 20th of any Palm/WINCE phone. If they had to run a radio comms stack on the iPod hardware though they'd struggle or the battery would last 2 hours.
I've a Sony Ericsson P910i. I get about 3 days between charges. I can listen to about 6 hours of music. It has 12 hours of talk time if you reduce the screen brightness. And that's using the old dual chips. CPU + Comms stack. The HTC phones and Treos don't get anywhere close.
So, a winning combination of Wi-Fi AND Microsoft's legendary security! Maybe the easy connection's required to download all those security patches.
If it could download tunes directly from a WISP hotspot...hmmm too complicated for the average punter.
So it's downloading from a home system and to save battery life would probably need to 'activated' on the occaisions you want to connect - why not just plug it in? Wasn't one of the big advantages of the original iPod over it's rivals the download speed of firewire vs USB1.1? Why go backwards?
Then again, these features don't need to have real benefits, just credibility at the Point Of Sale.
I don't think that's such a problem as you're only likely to switch WiFi on in a place you know there is WiFi. The problem is that people are dumb f*cks and expect to leave it on all the time. Unless you live within a permanent hotspot I don't see the point.
The Zune is supposedly coming with a 400Mhz CPU. Windows Mobile phones suck not just because of the OS but also because they require a fast CPU to get reasonable performance. Do anything and it kills battery life.
Palm is much better but it's still expensive power wise. They win mostly because they've not updated the OS since it's Dragonball 68K origins and basically even though you're running an emulator on an underclocked low speed ARM processor, the old 68K code runs quite well. That's because their phones do f*ck all and their software is 3-4 years behind the times.
Both systems rely on a discrete CPU and a separate radio stack for comms. That's at least two major chips in the phone with big power requirements. This is just not compatible with modern expectations of a phone from either consumers or manufacturers.
On the right side of the fence you've got Symbian (Nokia and Sony Ericsson mostly) running this year with very low speed, low power ARM CPUs with the comms stack built on the chip for a single chip solution with a very efficient OS. WINCE and Palm will be eaten up this year. I'm pretty sure Apple didn't enter the market with an iPhone this year because it would be absolutely pointless coming out with a smartphone which wasn't based on a single chip solution. Apple isn't stupid. They have to get it right first time.
Apple runs a dual core ARM CPU at sub 100Mhz IIRC in their iPods with a couple of ancillary chips to handle music/video codecs. It's in the same shitty position as MS and Palm for power with too many chips. It only works well in the iPod because it's not required to do anything complex and the chips are idling most of the time. They need to reduce the chip count but the overall power requirements is probably about a quarter of the Zune or any PDA (Palm or WINCE) and maybe a 20th of any Palm/WINCE phone. If they had to run a radio comms stack on the iPod hardware though they'd struggle or the battery would last 2 hours.
I've a Sony Ericsson P910i. I get about 3 days between charges. I can listen to about 6 hours of music. It has 12 hours of talk time if you reduce the screen brightness. And that's using the old dual chips. CPU + Comms stack. The HTC phones and Treos don't get anywhere close.
It's not a matter of being dumb. People know what they are told. If their manual doesn't say to keep WiFi off most of the time, they won't know that they should. Not everyone is as knowledeable as we are about these things. The phone comes with WiFi turned on as default.
If you check the spec's of both the 6700, and the 700p, or 700w, you will see that they all use pretty powerful chips. 315MHz for the Treo 700p, for example.
MS's Mobile OS is a strange one. While you can have 320 x 240, or 240 x 320, you can't have 320 x 320! So the Treo 700w has 240 x 240 instead of the 320 x 320 the 700p has. At 240 x 240, it's not easy. It requires more real estate than that to work well. The HTC has a fast cpu, but it's still a dog. It uses a 416MHz Xscale cpu from Intel. That's as good as one can get today. All of the MS mobile offerings have been slow for their generation. After a while the argument about a faster cpu just becomes meaningless. They will always need a cpu that is one generation newer, and faster, than what they have.
The 700p might have an "older" OS, but it still works better than Mobile 5. The odd thing is that Palm's systems have always synced to MS's software better than MS's own mobile offerings. This time isn't any different, for those who care. You can read the reviews on that. They all say the same thing.
The Palm also requires far fewer "clicks" to get something done then Mobile 5 does. Handwriting recognition software also works better on the Palm. I can't stand the poorly designed buttons on any of these devices, though the ones on the 6700 are better, the slide out keyboard feels too flimsy.
And, WiFi is still a bomb on these devices.
Symbian is just too primitive, and has far fewer programs than either Palm or windows. I know it's popular in Europe, but I'm not impressed.
The "sharing" songs wirelessly won't be an issue for the RIAA since these devices are used with a subscription service. No one owns any of the music. Any music downloaded from URGE will be sharable, whereas those ripped from a CD or DLd from another P2P service will not*. Since the RIAA gets their money regardless of who listens to what or how much they listen to, they will have no issue. We can do this now in iTunes kind of. Any non-DRMd song can be shared with any iTunes user on the same subnet.
If this is the Zune killer feature, I'm pretty underwhelmed.
The "sharing" songs wirelessly won't be an issue for the RIAA since these devices are used with a subscription service. No one owns any of the music. Any music downloaded from URGE will be sharable, whereas those ripped from a CD or DLd from another P2P service will not*. Since the RIAA gets their money regardless of who listens to what or how much they listen to, they will have no issue.
* yes, I am guessing, but it makes sense
I am almost certain the music industry doesn't see it that way. If the track is from a subscription service, they only want want subscribers to be listeners. I don't see how they would like sharing it out to other people's players. Maybe if both users are subscribers to the same type of service, then that might be different, but that sounds like something that would be hard to implement.
well i really dislike shaw wu's babbling and i think that we should wait for these devices to come out before crying about the battery life. for all we know, zune could have very efficient wifi power management. my palm tx is very afficient about this and turns wifi off after a period of inactivity, so it can be done. wifi doesn't equal short battery life.
i am looking forward for these zune devices. i just hope it's sort of xbox cool and not pocketPC-like.
dont flame me i still own an ipod nano but i believe competition is good. fanboys are bad.
well i really dislike shaw wu's babbling and i think that we should wait for these devices to come out before crying about the battery life. for all we know, zune could have very efficient wifi power management. my palm tx is very afficient about this and turns wifi off after a period of inactivity, so it can be done. wifi doesn't equal short battery life.
i am looking forward for these zune devices. i just hope it's sort of xbox cool and not pocketPC-like.
dont flame me i still own an ipod nano but i believe competition is good. fanboys are bad.
Fanbois are bad, but knowledge is good. I don't agree with you, but not because I'm a fanboi. I don't even have an iPod yet.
But, all of what I see shows that WiFi in a handheld is not a good idea.
Fanbois are bad, but knowledge is good. I don't agree with you, but not because I'm a fanboi. I don't even have an iPod yet.
But, all of what I see shows that WiFi in a handheld is not a good idea.
i agree with you. knowledge is good.
i also agree with you about wifi in a handheld not being such a good idea. i thought it would absolutely kick ass to have wifi on my palm, so that's why i bought the palm tx, and while the device lets you turn it on/off pretty easily, it's not all that great. signal can fade easily, palm web browsers are not that impressive (the whole internet jr. experience) and it's not even my most sought-after feature anymore. i find bluetooth potentially more appealing.
still, it's nice to at least have wifi, but after owning the palm tx i don't think it's such an impressive feature anymore. i appreciate other features even more, like the sd card expansion slots, bluetooth, infrared, the bright large display, the vast array of applications, etc.
Comments
Without better batteries, this feature won't be worth much more than its novelty.
Originally posted by Splinemodel
Bluetooth 2.0 won't be low power, if and when it ever comes out to spec.
You're thinking Bluetooth 3. Bluetooth 2.0 has been in Macs for well over a year.
Originally posted by wilco
You forget to refer to Gates as "Lil' Bill" in your third sentence.
Purely an minor oversight!!
Originally posted by DeaPeaJay
In my personal opinion, the next iPod won't have WiFi. I don't think the market is ready for it yet. Maybe the other players can pave the way for it while being total flops themselves. Then the iPod can come in at the opportune time and offer an innovative solution the other's weren't offering.
But the biggest reason, is that it's NOT like the cell phone network. You need to be in a hotspot for it to work. And there's simply not a lot of those at the moment. And some, you still have to pay for. And those you DON'T have to pay for, there's a welcome screen that loads in your browser and makes you accept terms of use before giving access. Obviously meant for a computer. How do the current WiFi devices work around that? Does anyone know?
Well, the PSP has a browser built-in... so that's how it connects to hotspots that require the user to agree to terms. I doubt an mp3 player will have a browser built in.
Originally posted by Splinemodel
Bluetooth 2.0 won't be low power, if and when it ever comes out to spec.
There has been tremendous effort to get ever lower power on Wifi devices, and this usually focuses on the MAC side of things. There are some Wifi products out there that have extremely low power consumption during idle periods, but there's really no way to decrease power usage all that much when the radio needs to be on. This is common of all massively-broadband technologies, a group in which Bluetooth EDR and WirelessUSB are both members.
The best part about all this Zune business is that Apple has been smiling the whole way. It's either foolish exuberance or a sign that they're about to drop a bomb.
Bluetooth 2 has lower power requirements than WiFi does, though I don't have the numbers here right now. But, even ver. 1 is good enough to transfer music files realtime.
As far as Wi-Fi goes, as others have said, the drawback is the scarcity of hot spots and the fact that at home you're already close to your computer so wi-fi wouldn't be such an advantage.
My 3 cents.
Originally posted by melgross
One of the reasons why I didn't buy the HTC 6700 phone was because the WiFi used up so much battery power, that reviewers, and users, said that they just kept it turned off. If you keep it turned off, what's the point? The talk battery life with it turned off is about 4+ hours. With it on, if you get one hour, good luck. I bought the Treo 700p when it came out. The other reason I didn't buy it is because windows mobile 5 still sucks power itself, and it's slow, and crashes too much.
If any of that is on this new product, they will be a problem for MS to overcome. Remembering to switch WiFi on and off again was such a problem for users of the phone to remember, that a number of people turned it in to their providers for other phones.
I don't think that's such a problem as you're only likely to switch WiFi on in a place you know there is WiFi. The problem is that people are dumb f*cks and expect to leave it on all the time. Unless you live within a permanent hotspot I don't see the point.
The Zune is supposedly coming with a 400Mhz CPU. Windows Mobile phones suck not just because of the OS but also because they require a fast CPU to get reasonable performance. Do anything and it kills battery life.
Palm is much better but it's still expensive power wise. They win mostly because they've not updated the OS since it's Dragonball 68K origins and basically even though you're running an emulator on an underclocked low speed ARM processor, the old 68K code runs quite well. That's because their phones do f*ck all and their software is 3-4 years behind the times.
Both systems rely on a discrete CPU and a separate radio stack for comms. That's at least two major chips in the phone with big power requirements. This is just not compatible with modern expectations of a phone from either consumers or manufacturers.
On the right side of the fence you've got Symbian (Nokia and Sony Ericsson mostly) running this year with very low speed, low power ARM CPUs with the comms stack built on the chip for a single chip solution with a very efficient OS. WINCE and Palm will be eaten up this year. I'm pretty sure Apple didn't enter the market with an iPhone this year because it would be absolutely pointless coming out with a smartphone which wasn't based on a single chip solution. Apple isn't stupid. They have to get it right first time.
Apple runs a dual core ARM CPU at sub 100Mhz IIRC in their iPods with a couple of ancillary chips to handle music/video codecs. It's in the same shitty position as MS and Palm for power with too many chips. It only works well in the iPod because it's not required to do anything complex and the chips are idling most of the time. They need to reduce the chip count but the overall power requirements is probably about a quarter of the Zune or any PDA (Palm or WINCE) and maybe a 20th of any Palm/WINCE phone. If they had to run a radio comms stack on the iPod hardware though they'd struggle or the battery would last 2 hours.
I've a Sony Ericsson P910i. I get about 3 days between charges. I can listen to about 6 hours of music. It has 12 hours of talk time if you reduce the screen brightness. And that's using the old dual chips. CPU + Comms stack. The HTC phones and Treos don't get anywhere close.
Originally posted by melgross
But, even ver. 1 is good enough to transfer music files realtime.
That depends. For a ~500 kbit/s ALAC, it'd get crowded.
If it could download tunes directly from a WISP hotspot...hmmm too complicated for the average punter.
So it's downloading from a home system and to save battery life would probably need to 'activated' on the occaisions you want to connect - why not just plug it in? Wasn't one of the big advantages of the original iPod over it's rivals the download speed of firewire vs USB1.1? Why go backwards?
Then again, these features don't need to have real benefits, just credibility at the Point Of Sale.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
I don't think that's such a problem as you're only likely to switch WiFi on in a place you know there is WiFi. The problem is that people are dumb f*cks and expect to leave it on all the time. Unless you live within a permanent hotspot I don't see the point.
The Zune is supposedly coming with a 400Mhz CPU. Windows Mobile phones suck not just because of the OS but also because they require a fast CPU to get reasonable performance. Do anything and it kills battery life.
Palm is much better but it's still expensive power wise. They win mostly because they've not updated the OS since it's Dragonball 68K origins and basically even though you're running an emulator on an underclocked low speed ARM processor, the old 68K code runs quite well. That's because their phones do f*ck all and their software is 3-4 years behind the times.
Both systems rely on a discrete CPU and a separate radio stack for comms. That's at least two major chips in the phone with big power requirements. This is just not compatible with modern expectations of a phone from either consumers or manufacturers.
On the right side of the fence you've got Symbian (Nokia and Sony Ericsson mostly) running this year with very low speed, low power ARM CPUs with the comms stack built on the chip for a single chip solution with a very efficient OS. WINCE and Palm will be eaten up this year. I'm pretty sure Apple didn't enter the market with an iPhone this year because it would be absolutely pointless coming out with a smartphone which wasn't based on a single chip solution. Apple isn't stupid. They have to get it right first time.
Apple runs a dual core ARM CPU at sub 100Mhz IIRC in their iPods with a couple of ancillary chips to handle music/video codecs. It's in the same shitty position as MS and Palm for power with too many chips. It only works well in the iPod because it's not required to do anything complex and the chips are idling most of the time. They need to reduce the chip count but the overall power requirements is probably about a quarter of the Zune or any PDA (Palm or WINCE) and maybe a 20th of any Palm/WINCE phone. If they had to run a radio comms stack on the iPod hardware though they'd struggle or the battery would last 2 hours.
I've a Sony Ericsson P910i. I get about 3 days between charges. I can listen to about 6 hours of music. It has 12 hours of talk time if you reduce the screen brightness. And that's using the old dual chips. CPU + Comms stack. The HTC phones and Treos don't get anywhere close.
It's not a matter of being dumb. People know what they are told. If their manual doesn't say to keep WiFi off most of the time, they won't know that they should. Not everyone is as knowledeable as we are about these things. The phone comes with WiFi turned on as default.
If you check the spec's of both the 6700, and the 700p, or 700w, you will see that they all use pretty powerful chips. 315MHz for the Treo 700p, for example.
MS's Mobile OS is a strange one. While you can have 320 x 240, or 240 x 320, you can't have 320 x 320! So the Treo 700w has 240 x 240 instead of the 320 x 320 the 700p has. At 240 x 240, it's not easy. It requires more real estate than that to work well. The HTC has a fast cpu, but it's still a dog. It uses a 416MHz Xscale cpu from Intel. That's as good as one can get today. All of the MS mobile offerings have been slow for their generation. After a while the argument about a faster cpu just becomes meaningless. They will always need a cpu that is one generation newer, and faster, than what they have.
The 700p might have an "older" OS, but it still works better than Mobile 5. The odd thing is that Palm's systems have always synced to MS's software better than MS's own mobile offerings. This time isn't any different, for those who care. You can read the reviews on that. They all say the same thing.
The Palm also requires far fewer "clicks" to get something done then Mobile 5 does. Handwriting recognition software also works better on the Palm. I can't stand the poorly designed buttons on any of these devices, though the ones on the 6700 are better, the slide out keyboard feels too flimsy.
And, WiFi is still a bomb on these devices.
Symbian is just too primitive, and has far fewer programs than either Palm or windows. I know it's popular in Europe, but I'm not impressed.
Originally posted by Chucker
That depends. For a ~500 kbit/s ALAC, it'd get crowded.
Sure, but almost no one uses anything but 128Kb/s files, so it doesn't really matter.
If this is the Zune killer feature, I'm pretty underwhelmed.
* yes, I am guessing, but it makes sense
Originally posted by jasong
The "sharing" songs wirelessly won't be an issue for the RIAA since these devices are used with a subscription service. No one owns any of the music. Any music downloaded from URGE will be sharable, whereas those ripped from a CD or DLd from another P2P service will not*. Since the RIAA gets their money regardless of who listens to what or how much they listen to, they will have no issue.
* yes, I am guessing, but it makes sense
I am almost certain the music industry doesn't see it that way. If the track is from a subscription service, they only want want subscribers to be listeners. I don't see how they would like sharing it out to other people's players. Maybe if both users are subscribers to the same type of service, then that might be different, but that sounds like something that would be hard to implement.
i am looking forward for these zune devices. i just hope it's sort of xbox cool and not pocketPC-like.
dont flame me i still own an ipod nano but i believe competition is good. fanboys are bad.
Originally posted by monkeyastronaut
well i really dislike shaw wu's babbling and i think that we should wait for these devices to come out before crying about the battery life. for all we know, zune could have very efficient wifi power management. my palm tx is very afficient about this and turns wifi off after a period of inactivity, so it can be done. wifi doesn't equal short battery life.
i am looking forward for these zune devices. i just hope it's sort of xbox cool and not pocketPC-like.
dont flame me i still own an ipod nano but i believe competition is good. fanboys are bad.
Fanbois are bad, but knowledge is good. I don't agree with you, but not because I'm a fanboi. I don't even have an iPod yet.
But, all of what I see shows that WiFi in a handheld is not a good idea.
Originally posted by melgross
Fanbois are bad, but knowledge is good. I don't agree with you, but not because I'm a fanboi. I don't even have an iPod yet.
But, all of what I see shows that WiFi in a handheld is not a good idea.
I'm a fanPod.
Originally posted by melgross
Fanbois are bad, but knowledge is good. I don't agree with you, but not because I'm a fanboi. I don't even have an iPod yet.
But, all of what I see shows that WiFi in a handheld is not a good idea.
i agree with you. knowledge is good.
i also agree with you about wifi in a handheld not being such a good idea. i thought it would absolutely kick ass to have wifi on my palm, so that's why i bought the palm tx, and while the device lets you turn it on/off pretty easily, it's not all that great. signal can fade easily, palm web browsers are not that impressive (the whole internet jr. experience) and it's not even my most sought-after feature anymore. i find bluetooth potentially more appealing.
still, it's nice to at least have wifi, but after owning the palm tx i don't think it's such an impressive feature anymore. i appreciate other features even more, like the sd card expansion slots, bluetooth, infrared, the bright large display, the vast array of applications, etc.
Originally posted by jenkij
Does this mean we'll be constantly bombarded with "audio popups"?
Last Zune to catch a Wi-Fi virus ("wirus"?) is a rotten egg.