iPod vs. Zune: January 2008 High End MP3 Player Roundup
by Ryan Smith on January 21, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
iPod Touch, Cont
Beyond its traditional media player abilities, the Touch also includes the full suite of iPhone applications, which were missing-in-action initially but Apple has since corrected the bungle on their part and new Touches are shipping with them (we're less happy however that owners of older Touches have to pay $20). The iPhone's excellent Safari browser is included with the Touch and functions every bit as well as we'd expect. The 480x320 screen of the Touch means that it's not a perfect replica of the desktop web browsing experience in spite of Apple's claims otherwise, but otherwise it's very easy to use. The jump start on web application development thanks to the iPhone launch means there are already numerous AJAX web applications that have been developed specifically for the iPhone/Touch that extend the usefulness of Safari and the Touch as a whole.
Also included are the YouTube player and the iTunes WiFi Music Store. The YouTube player loses some practicality in the transition from the iPhone, due to the fact that the Touch only includes a polyphonic tone generator instead of a (larger) speaker. This means that anyone wanting to share videos will also need to share their earbuds, something few of us are generally willing to do.
As for the iTunes WiFi Music Store, Apple doesn't pull any surprises. Given that the device has WiFi abilities it would have been a significant oversight not to include a store - something a lot of users have been waiting on their MP3 players for some time now - so there it is. Like everything else with the Touch that is a translation of a Mac OS X application, the UI has been structured specifically for the Touch and works well given the device's abilities. We would recommend keeping the Touch close to your wallet however, it's easy to quickly forget that you can rack up the music bill quickly with the Touch when buying music.
Rounding out the applications are Apple's personal information management applications Calendar, Contacts, and Mail, along with the general use applications Clock, Calculator, Stocks, Weather, Maps, and Notes. Because these applications were all originally designed around the iPhone, they do lose some of their usefulness on the Touch due to the lack of EDGE capabilities, but especially with the proliferation of city-wide WiFi in some areas it's hard to say they're hobbled in any significant way. If you want to know our thoughts on these applications we'll save on the redundancy and point you to our iPhone review, there has been very little chance in application functionality since that was published. Although Apple was late in including the full iPhone application suite with the Touch, the end result is that finally doing so is to their benefit: the difference between having the applications and not is the difference between an artificially hobbled media player and one of the best PDAs we have ever used.
The design of the Touch's hardware straddles the line between that of an iPod and that of an iPhone: the back is traditional iPod chrome while the front is Spartan with the touch screen and the single home button. The entire device is a fingerprint magnet, and both the chrome and the screen make fingerprints very obvious; this is a bit of a change from other iPods where the matte scroll wheel isn't a fingerprint problem. Granted, it's not really possible to make a touch screen that isn't a fingerprint magnet, but perfectionists will probably have a heart attack. For the rest of us Apple includes a polishing cloth that will no doubt see a lot of use. We do have a minor gripe about the location of the headphone jack however, it's on the bottom which means the earbud plug jabs in to our palm. It could have been put at a location to make the jabbing worse, but it could have also been placed at the top which to us seems like a more sensible location in every way.
The build quality of the Touch is generally excellent with only one minor flaw. Because of the chrome back, a small plastic "window" exists near the top-right corner of the device to allow the WiFi radio to communicate uninterrupted; this itself isn't a problem but on our unit the window isn't flush with the chrome, making it possible for the chrome at the edge of the window to catch on things. Otherwise the Touch oozes the usual Apple design polish, with a very solid design that is hard to break, including the glass screen which judging from the iPhone is virtually unbreakable.
Given all of this however, the Touch isn't perfect; Apple did a good job with the hardware but the software is lacking. On top of the issues we've outlined earlier with the touch screen controls, there are a few more things we believe Apple didn't deliver on quite as well as they could have.
Apple's lack of imagination in using the Touch's WiFi is very obvious at times. Wireless synchronization is not supported and while this is a boondoggle for security issues, Microsoft made it work for the Zune which is plenty of proof that it's possible. Such a feature is definitely useful, especially for minor transfers such as PIM data where the data set is small and there may not otherwise be a need to recharge the Touch at that time. The lack of internet radio abilities is also a disappointment; we have no doubts the Touch's battery wouldn't be able to pull off the play time it can with regular music files due to the power requirements of the WiFi radio, but that should be up to the user to decide if they want to bother with the feature. We certainly would like to be able to listen to our favorite internet radio stations given that the device already has all of the necessary hardware.
Next is how the Touch interfaces with a host computer. Unlike the iPod Classic line, the Touch is not a USB mass storage device but rather a custom device requiring a device driver. This means the Touch can't be used as a portable USB hard drive like the Classic can (although this is admittedly less of an issue with the Touch's much smaller flash memory) but it also means the Touch is only supported by a limited number of operating systems. Apple has never officially supported Linux but since prior iPods have been USB mass storage devices, it has been fairly trivial for capable Linux programmers to write their own programs. This isn't the case for the Touch, where a quick check on our part didn't come across any drivers for it at all. Furthermore Apple was extremely late to the game for supporting Vista x64, it wasn't until this month that they finally released a version of iTunes with a 64bit driver. Given what's happened we can easily see the driver requirements for the device continuing to be a problem for the Touch and its successors.
Out final gripe is once again the earbuds. We didn't like them with the Classic, we still don't like them with the Touch. With the 16GB Touch featuring a $400 MSRP, the issue has moved beyond annoying and towards simply silly.
Before closing out our thoughts on the Touch, the modability of the Touch bears a quick mention. If you're willing to break your warranty, it's possible to run user-created applications on the Touch by jailbreaking it to allow installation of further applications. Apple will be rolling out their iPhone/Touch SDK in February, but we suspect it will be a few months for developers to catch up, and the application signing requirement (along with what we imagine will be a fee to acquire a key) will be a turn off to some developers. In the mean time the iPhone/Touch community has had over half a year to develop a number of good applications that can be installed on a jailbroken Touch, including a number of games, IM clients, UI customizations, and even a SSH server for your inner-*nix hacker. There's a definite risk to jailbreaking a Touch but at the moment it adds a lot of value to the device.
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TedKord - Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - link
A mac IS a PC these days, only with fewer hardware choices and OSX instead of Windows/Linux, etc...Dennis Travis - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
Interesting. I really like the Zune but use Macs for my everyday computing. Go figure! I do have Windows machines also but it would be nice if MS made the Zune work with OSX. I know many with Macs who like the Zune.madoka - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
I know I'm not alone in this and as wrong as it maybe, everytime I see someone with a Zune, I think that that person could either not afford or was too cheap to pay for an ipod.marybear423 - Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - link
Riight...zune 80gb $249.99
ipod 80gb $249.00
Looks like all those "poor people" had to go cheap and shell out an extra $0.99 for their zune...
Brilliant. A+ for you.
kmmatney - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
I want to commend you on nailing a huge issue in your introduction - gift cards. I was thnking about getting one of the lasser known MP3 brands - but I had to by my plasyer with BestBuy gift cards, so that ruled out a lot of my choices. I ended up going with the 8G Ipod Nano, since I liked that out of my choices at BestBuy. When your stuck with BestBuy, to really only have a few choices for a high end MP3 player.rhangman - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
The only reason I bought an iPod was because at the time they were the only players that could be controlled by car head units. Just did a quick search and I couldn't really see anything for Zune's. Since I bought my head unit (Alpine) the number of iPod compatible decks (after market and stock) has increased significantly too.rcbm1970 - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
Almost every review I have read that compares the zune 80 to the Ipod classic points out one very import feature: the superior sound quality if the zune. It isn't the earbuds its the sound quality of the base components. I took my the earbuds that came with my zune 80 and listened to many of the competition, and there is no comparison; the zune 80 is superior. As with the Iphone and its horrible call quality, the marketing of the cult and its design ignores the purpose of the device. This should be about sound quality being the primary concern. The fact that you were craving for an equalizers shows how little you understand about the sound quality issue. Did you understand that you are to fully place the zune earbuds into your ear to get the proper bass sound? I also question if you gave yourself enough time to get used to the zunes control features. It was into the third week before I started to get used to the short cuts. I will stick with cnet and pcmag if you produce reviews such as this.rcbm1970 - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
I should clarify. By competition, I mean apple products. The creative products produce great sound. I haven't been able to compare to iriver devices, but the cnet folks have. This is really simple when shopping for these devices do look at the reviews, but then take your favorite set of headphones or buds (apple buds the exception) and listen to each device in the store. You will find the listening difference between the apple products and many of the others is analogous to dragging your hand across raw cardboard compared to fine finished wood. We have become so used to bad quality that we don't realize how good it can be.darkswordsman17 - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
People,d the reason you shouldn't include stuff like the Zen and the Karma is that they are discontinued (in the case of the Karmas for a few years now). The Zen Vision: M is the closes to a direct competitor that Creative made to these two, and it is discontinued. We can throw the Cowon X5 in there as well. The new Zen I don't find comparable because it is flash based. It would be nice to see a flash comparison (where the Zune and iPods would get handed to it in price/performance and features, although the Touch would do well but it costs put it out of most people's consideration). There is a reason why there isn't any company making a music focused HDD based player, trying to compete with Microsoft and Apple is asking to lose money, and neither of those two are really competitive in the flash based players (at least on features and price), which allows them to actually compete. Of course that doesn't stop the iPods and Zunes from outselling them still.As for the slowdown on the Classic, have you tried using one with the updated firmware? The launch units did have some very bad slowdown, but it has since been resolved and is now much speedier.
On the sound quality side, I was a bit unimpressed, as hooking them up to machines to check their sound quality doesn't tell the whole story. I have not seen a single person who has heard both the Classic or recent iPods (which many say sound better than the Classic although some say the Classic is better as well) and the Zunes who did not say the Zunes sound much better to their ears. The Zune 80 especially is known to have an execptionally clean headphone out (most people don't recognize noise in the signal when they hear it, mostly because they aren't used to using higher quality audio components, and no I'm not talking $50,000 speakers here either).
Thats not to say the author's findings aren't valid, they just don't tell the whole story. I suggest checking out one of the many DAP/PMP review sites (such as DAPReview, AnythingbutiPod) and also forums such as the portable audio one on Head-Fi if you want more user consensus and in depth testing.
Bottom line, if you need the storage and don't want to spend to get into the PMP category, then the iPod Classic or Zune are both quite good, each with its own strenghts. For flash players, the new Zen is very nice but has issues with the SD expansion slot (it doesn't integrate its music and other files with that of those on the players internal memory). The Cowon D2 is very good, although I'd wait because I think they're probably going to up capacity on them fairly soon. In that same vein the iRiver Clix 2 is pretty nice as is the Meizu M6 I think its called. The Sandisk Sansas are ok, but they are targeted more at packing features in than actually being that good at anything (sound quality, interface, etc). Lastly, there is the new Sony players, which although they lack the expansion slots that have become defacto, they have gotten rid of needing software for use and all the DRM crap that hurt Sony so badly. Also they compete well with the iPod and Zunes in price and features, all the while having some of if not the best sound from a portable music player. Personally, I wouldn't even consider the flash based iPods or Zunes at all as they're high on price and low on features compared to the competition. Couple that with Amazon being a better place to get music online than either iTunes or the Zune marketplace (no DRM at all, not just on some music, competitive price with better quality) and there's no reason to tie yourself to a setup like that (Amazon has a utility that will sync your downloads from them with iTunes so thats a non-issue).
Odeen - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
Any "high-end" MP3 player comparisons should also include the Rio Karma for a few reasons:The Karma is the de-facto standard in sound quality for MP3 files, and includes a dock that allows one to output line-level audio, bypassing the internal amplifier
The Karma includes a 5-band parametric equalizer. Not only can you individually adjust any of the five bands, but you can also change the scope of the adjustment, as the "width" of the band is customizable
The Karma is the only player that supports proper gapless playback with regular MP3 files. I don't know about you, but pauses and clicks where the music should be seamless is a huge reduction in sound quality.
The Karma is the only player that supports free codecs of both lossy and lossless variety. If MP3 suddenly goes the way of the GIF (i.e. the format creator starts pursuing royalties more aggressively) and your mp3's are outlawed, the Karma will still play OGG and FLAC files, formats that cannot be patented or restricted.
Basically, if you are comparing "MP3 Players", first and foremost judge them on how well they PLAY MP3's. I consider that any player wishing for itself to be considered "high end" should produce good sound quality without skipping or popping between tracks - which neither the iPod or Zune can. Everything else is pretty much gravy - whether it's a user interface that's not steeped in heavy geek, whether it's tight integration with a media management suite or music store, whether it's the ability to play videos or squirt. A high-end MP3 player should play MP3's better than anything else, and that's not what the iPod or the Zune offer.