When the iPod mini was about to launch earlier this year, it had a huge number of pre-orders before it even hit the stores. It features a 1,000 song capacity, comes in different colours but is priced a lot more than many competing products. Due to its huge success, many competitors have launched their own set of competing players focusing more on style and compact size than features. Just to show how popular iPod has got, they have 92% of the portable HD based player market.
This month, four new competing products from Dell, Rio, Creative and Virgin Electronics are aiming to compete by taking on most of the iPod mini features as well as several extras. One thing these lack is iTunes store compatibility, but then again these all support stores the iPod does not support. Common features include a 5GB hard drive (25% more than iPod mini), lower cost and music collection synchronisation through Windows Media Player 10. The Virgin and Creative players offer FM radio. The Rio also tries competing on style, size and double the battery life of the iPod mini.
However even though the iPod may lack a radio, line-in recording and a removable battery, it has one main feature that the rivals lack - quick and precise scrolling using its clickwheel. This makes it very straight forward to quickly scan though a huge song collection while stop spot-on the required song. This could be compared to quickly tuning a manual knob FM radio to one point on the band compared with a digital display FM radio that can only be tuned in small fixed steps. While the rivals have tried all sorts of navigation techniques, none quite match up to the scrolling capability of the iPod.
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The San Jose Mercury News called the iPod Mini "cool, colorful and too expensive." PC Magazine wrote that "you are paying dearly for the miniaturization." And Business Week Online declared it doomed, another of the occasional "fits of delusion" by Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive. But the Mini was an enormous hit, and back-ordered for months. Its appeal was never about logic; it's about emotion, style and status. It's so small, cool and comforting in the hand that to hold one is to want one. (The reviewer for Business Week Online had the guts to write a second column, apologizing for the first.) Inevitably, the Mini inspired other companies to send in the clones. This month you'll be able to choose from four impressive iPod Mini competitors, courtesy of Dell, Rio, Creative and Virgin Electronics. Some of the similarities are broad, like the charging cable that also auto-loads a copy of your music collection from your PC. Some are tiny: the iPod-like "Don't steal music" sticker (on the Dell's screen), the choice of colors (Creative's Zen Micro comes in 10) or the fingerprint- and scratch-prone mirror-chrome back panel (on the Rio Carbon). |
Going by people I spoke to who have used an iPod, the two main features they like about the player is its style and its ease of navigation. Most did not seem to know (or care) about the short life internal battery or music store limitation. For example there is an Ad that plays quite often on the radio here about the iPod's huge capacity capability as well as being able to download your favourite music online via Eircom broadband to play on it. What they don't say is that Eircom only offers an OD2 based music store which is not compatible with the iPod and neither is there an iTunes music store in Ireland.
Source: New York Times (Subscription)
