July 27th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
I’ve been writing about the iPod speaker market for some time… well, I’ve spent a good bit of time testing and using them as well.
Easily the best portable iPod speakerdock has been the iH27 from iHome. It’s a great portable speaker, runs on batteries, and has an alarm clock built in so you can wake up in the morning to your tunes. Great for long business trips where I can’t count on the hotel having a decent stereo, and I can’t live without my music.
So this is why I am glad to see the iP27 hitting the market… if only overseas for now. The iP27 is the “Works with iPhone” version of the iH27 (note: the iP27 doesn’t seem to be branded “iHome2go” anymore). This means that my (soon to be acquired) iPhone can sit on the dock without annoying buzzing disturbing my sheep-counting at night, and the iPhone can still effectively receive phone calls without being disturbed by the surrounding speaker enclosure.
iHome, no doubt, had to jump through engineering hoops to get this design certified for iPhone. It’s obvious from how few models are out today that come with the certification.
Can’t wait to snag one of these and make it a permanent fixture in my luggage.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
While many early adopter types (like me) have been fiddling with Airtunes, and looking for ways to turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a remote control for whole home audio, clearly the engineers at Apple have been doing the same, and building the native functionality into the iPhone OS 2.0 and the latest version of iTunes.The iTune remote page over at Apple pretty much explains it all. No longer will we need Signal.
Remote features include:
- Basic security for connecting iTunes and Apple TV libraries
- iPod controls user interface you are already used to when playing back content form a given library
- Intuitive search-as-you-type. Very cool. Type “r-o” get any content that contains such letter-sequence grouped as songs, artists, albums, etc.
- Multi-room destination control. Remote allows you to control what rooms the audio plays back through if you are using Airtunes devices.
- Adjustable buffer size. Allows you to adjust whether you want a short or long buffer enabling less or more interference robustness and throughput reliability.
All good stuff. Can’t wait to get my hands on it. I specifically want to answer the following questions:
- How does it deal with multiple remotes in the same house?
- How well does the remote provide instant and clear state feedback on the current system configuration?
- How does a single remote deal with setting up a multi-source topology?
- How does it deal with contention for a single receiver, i.e. what happens if you try to send audio to the same room from two different libraries using two different remotes?
- How well in practice does the interference robustness perform?
- How annoying does the delay introduced by the buffer really become over time?
No matter the result, I am sure Apple will delight many with a feature no one was really expecting.
July 6th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Imation buys XtremeMac. Not a very big deal, about $9-15M.I suspect we’ll be seeing more consolidation in this space.
January 8th, 2008 at 2:55 am
November 16th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
At the risk of piling on to an overcrowded topic, I think it’s worth noting that the Zune guys pulled off a major coup. I don’t think anyone could have reasonably expected Softy to come out with a device that dethroned the iPod, but the fact that they have now officially changed the conversation is what matters.
As people nitpick the device, the UI, the early depth of music selection, I think they largely miss the point. Until today, you couldn’t find an alternative to the iPod in terms of a vertically integrated experience. It was always also-rans (SanDisk, iRiver, Rio, Creative), which built nice product, but were burdened somewhat by cumbersome Playsforsure technology, and bulky and quirky on-line services. These also-rans were forced to differentiate-by-design, which is a losing battle when your market leader is, for better or worse, the de facto leader in ergonomics and industrial design. Even Sony, who one might think… ok let’s not go there.
What Zune did was offer a complete experience for end-users, and added a wireless interface which has amazing option value to both consumers and Microsoft. They didn’t try to battle iPod on design, in fact I think they were skillfully unassuming, and picked a design that is at the very least, non-threatening, and non-polarizing. Keeping the focus on the new features, and the promise of a total solution. Preliminary evidence that Zune was successful was the study published by ABI research that shows even iPod users consider the Zune a viable alternative. How much switching materializes remains to be seen, but if Softy wanted to change the conversation (all one can reasonably expect) in the portable jukebox market, I think the bottom line is, mission accomplished.
I am not waiting in line to pick up my Zune, but rest assured, when the time comes to invigorate my gadget repertoire, the Zune will be on the short list.
