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
Battery Life
Kicking off our objective benchmarking we have the battery life benchmarks for our MP3 players. Skimping on battery life is one way manufacturers can make a product thinner through a smaller battery, but if the battery life is too low then it works against a device by requiring it to be tethered to a charger too much.
For our tests, we ran each device from a full charge until it stopped playing, recording how long it took. The volume was at a moderate volume, and the device went untouched the entire time. This has a slight bias effect because it results in the screen being turned on less often than under normal usage for music, but the effect should be fairly consistent among the players.
For both the Zune and iPod Touch, WiFi was enabled. For movie playback we used a movie encoded in H.264 at 1.5Mbps 640x480, which is the average resolution and bitrate for a video purchased from Apple's store.
Because the iPod Classic is built primarily as an audio player, this is one of the areas where it shines the most. With 34 hours of playing time (4 hours over spec), it lasts for a ridiculous amount of time that neither the iPod Touch nor Zune can touch. We're confident that 34 hours should be enough for anyone, and if that's not enough the 160GB version has a spec of 40 hours play time.
The original Zune was a power hog, and while Microsoft has improved on it some with the Zune 80, it still fails to break 20 hours, when the specifications for the Zune 80 call for 29 hours. Given that the screen is off for music playback and the WiFi implementation should not be drawing a lot of power, we're left to wonder if it's just an inefficient design, an undersized battery, or if something else is going on. Microsoft has access to the same hard drives as Apple so there aren't many potential candidates to explain the limited run time compared to the Classic.
Finally the Touch performs well enough but still can't touch the iPod Classic. At nearly 22 hours it provides enough run time if all you're doing is listening to music, but 22 hours is probably going to be an overestimate of actual run time due to all of the other (power sucking) functionality of the Touch. We had expected a bit more out of the Touch given that it is a flash based player.
For video, screen size becomes a matter of importance. It should be unsurprising that the iPod Classic, the device with the smallest screen is the winner here with 6 hours. But as we feel the screen size is too small to be practical, we'd consider this a hollow victory for Apple.
We follow this with the Touch, which is definitely not a hollow victory for Apple at 5 hours and 30 minutes. The Touch has the biggest screen of all of these devices, so to come in so close to the Classic is a very good situation for the Touch. We suspect what it loses due to the screen is picked up from being a flash based device.
And finally we have the Zune, which has the worst of both worlds with a large screen and a hard drive. While the Zune could claim to trail the Touch in audio, it's nowhere close in video. 3 hours and 15 minutes will get you a movie and some music time, but we'd call anything under 4 hours uncomfortably short.
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cmdrdredd - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
The Zune skips and pops? when? prove that to me? hell even the iPod doesn't skip or pop...that's in your recording and your piss poor 128kbps limewire bootleg downloads.Odeen - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
I am referring to Zune and iPod's inability to seamlessly transition from one song to the next (such as for a live concert recording, classical music, or a techno mix album).Since MP3's are composed of a fixed number of "frames" of approximately 418 bytes, any song has some amount of silence at the last frame. The Karma detects this silence and begins to decode the next track in the playlist before the previous track ends. As a result, the seamless transition from the CD (or live) source is preserved.
On the other hand, the iPod and Zune dumbly play the ENTIRE mp3 file. The sudden transition to silence, and beginning to play again sounds like a "pop". It has nothing to do with the bitrate or source of mp3 files.
Other file formats, like OGG and FLAC have metadata that tell the player the exact length of the recording. As a result, the player doesn't have to analyze the file for trailing silence, and this works even better in eliminating gaps. However, without 3rd party hacks, the iPod and Zune can't play those file formats either.
http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/">http://www.pretentiousname.com/mp3players/
Tegeril - Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - link
Perhaps you haven't used an iPod in a while, but the gapless playback feature works perfectly. Please try again.Odeen - Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - link
It works for recent MP3's with proper song length metadata.It doesn't work for older MP3's without that information. The Karma can still play the older MP3's gaplessly by actually analyzing the audio data, whereas the iPod needs to have the song length tags spoon-fed to it.
Roffles - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
I currently own a Zune80. Although I watched an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" at lunch today, I use it 90% for listening to music.All these gimmicky features with new mp3 players are nice, but this review (and the designers of Zune and Ipod) lost focus of what an MP3 player is all about. It's about listening to mp3's right?
The main factors that should decide which player is best are:
1. GUI responsiveness, GUI design and GUI navigation.
2. Audio fidelity and customization.
3. Battery life
4. A higher level of customization
Everything else should be a distant second as they are the features more akin to PMP (personal media players). If it were not for the 80GB drive size, I would have stayed with a tried and true Korean mp3 player from Iriver or Cowon.
I would rather compare the Zune to my Cowon i7 and a2 as far as features are concerned. The Zune is a major firmware update away from being the ultimate mp3 player.
1. Cowon gives me a graphic equalizer (custom and several presets)
and lots of audio tweaking options such as jeteffect, BBE, Mach3Bass, MP Enhance, 3D surround, Pan and Play speed.
2. Cowon gives me more shuffle options
3. Cowon gives me a sleep timer and a wakeup timer so I can lullabye myself into an afternoon nap if I choose.
4. Cowon lets me customize text scroll speeds and other gui enhancements.
5. Cowon also gives me an FM player, and then lets me record FM radio with custom bit rates.
6. Cowon gives me a voice recorder with custom bit rates
7. Cowon gives me a text viewer
8. Cowon lets me adjust scan speed (good for very long recorded talk shows or joined albums and mixes that can be hours long)
9. Cowon gives me the option to use id3 tag browsing or filename browsing
All these options with exception to a few of the obvious ones on the list make listening to mp3's easier and more enjoyable...hence making it a better mp3 player.
There are DOZENS of other smaller tweaks and customization that I won't bother getting into, but I hope I'm making a good point here. Also, the audio output (power and fidelity at normal equalization) is amazing compared to anything I've heard from an Ipod or Zune.
VashHT - Thursday, January 31, 2008 - link
I have thought about replacing my Cowon X5 for a while, the mainr eason I won't buy an Ipod is because I don't want to use itunes or reformat all of my music into itunes format. One thing that I hate about all of these mainstream playes is they won't support .wav files. I back up all of my CD's in .wav format on my PC, and with my X5 I can just put them on there and not worry about converting anything. Sure the extra fidelity is pretty much lost when using most earbuds or headphones, but if I use the AUX output to hook them up to speakers or use decent headphones with it then the wav files obviously sound a lot better. Also with 80Gb of space or more the much larger file size of wav files becomes practically a non-point. Also, besides wav it supports a lot of other open formats, and for compressed format I would much rather use OGG than mp3.Ripvanwinkle - Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - link
Cowon all the way! My only complaint with my D2 is that itrefuses to make my coffee in the morning.
ThePooBurner - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
How can you do a High End MP3 player round up and not include the Creative Zen series? A Player that is technologically superior to both the Icrap and the Zripoff? That is all.Ryan Smith - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
I actually agree with you on the matter. We wanted to include a Zen and a couple other players, but we weren't able to acquire anything more than what we have today. As is the case when you're relaunching some kind of product coverage, we hope we'll be able to get players from additional vendors for future articles.michael2k - Monday, January 21, 2008 - link
How do you define "technologically superior"? The UI of the iPod (with the scrollwheel) can be seen as technologically superior (at least since it's introduction in 2001), though you can argue that since 2004 with the introduction of the Zen that Creative caught up. The hard drive of the iPod (which has been 1.8" since 2001) can also be noted as technologically superior, though again Creative caught up with their 2004 Zen Micro and Zen 1" and 1.8" products.Then there is battery life and size... If you want to claim Creative Zen is technologically superior, fine, but there are multiple facets to superiority here.