Zune Coming to Canada with Social Savvy
Microsoft has just released new software for Zune and announced it’s coming to Canada in June. Zune will arrive to Canada with enhanced social media appeal so you can keep in touch with other Zune users – if you can find any!
Zune is the third most popular MP3 player on the market, which sounds good until you consider that after iPod the market curve runs off a cliff.
Apple’s iPod has 71 percent of the market followed by SanDisk’s players with a distant 11 percent. The almost not-worth-mentioning third is Zune carrying a 4 percent market share.
For what it’s worth, Zune is an impressive little MP3 player. It has all of iPod’s ease-of-use and great sound quality. As someone who has reviewed an array of these products that’s more than I can say for the budget MP3 players by Sandisk.
Since 2006 when Zune launched, portable media players have been increasingly dominated by cell phones. Considering iPod’s dominance, to bet that Zune will be successful is a bet that the average iPod user is willing to upgrade from their old iPod to a new Zune rather than an iPhone. It’s not a bet I’d be willing to take.
Nowadays there are many PDA-media-phones (including those that run Windows Mobile) that playback MP3 and Mpeg video and use cheap, plentiful SD memory cards for storage.
One of the biggest advantages of using a cell phone media player is that you get to sidestep exclusive software restrictions. Let’s face it - iTunes is a pain in the ass! And any substitute for iTunes is going to be equally so.
Once you use a portable media player that only needs good old fashioned Windows Explorer, it’s difficult to go back to restrictive management systems like iTunes.
The new Zune software offers NBC TV shows which iTunes cannot because of past difficulties Apple has had with the popular television studio. The most significant trick with the new Zune is the Zune Card.
The Zune Card is your gateway to a Zune’s powerful new social community and music discovery system. Copy the Zune Card to your blog or even your Facebook account and you’ll be sharing your musical taste with all your friends in no time. Provided of course all your friends have a Zune. Therein lay the system’s Achilles heel – it’s not free.
Social media and communities are popular for keeping in touch. Adding a music-discovery element to the social community is a brilliant idea. But the problem with the Zune Card is it’s based around a product that most people have no use for. Especially considering the MP3 player market itself is destined to shrivel over the coming years, being replaced by more sophisticated cell phones like HTC Touch and iPhone 3G.
I'm about as sick of iPods as i am of that damn Feist song they use in their commercial.