Monday, November 13, 2006

Yes! What this world needs is another mp3 player!

Microsoft's Zune is coming out tomorrow. It looks just like the iPod, is used in the same way, and in as many colors as you like, as long as they're shades of grey. The only big difference from the iPod is the ability to wifi to others and share your songs with others. This may be cool - but these shared songs only play for 3 days or 3 times until they're automatically..hmm.. 'zuned out?' by the player.

There are a slew of mp3 players in the market including a number of low priced ones. The Zune is priced against the iPod around $250.

Will Zune spawn a whole new range of accessories? Will it give birth to new lingo? As a matter of fact, the name isn't half as catchy as the iPod. It'll be hard to verbify it too. What about Collaborative Zunecasts?

Without any real differentiators, what will give Zune the edge? How about having cobranded Zunes, designer Zunes? In any case, will they be able to beat up Apple's 70% share of the digital music market?


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IE7 returns

I think Tabs on firefox are probably a top10 usability feature ever. Being able to use tabs to open multiple sites and simply ctrl-tab to scroll through them simply rocks.

Tabs were probably the biggest reason I liked Firefox for. I didn't expect IE to catch up, but when I installed IE7, I was hooked! Suddenly to me, IE is back at par with Firefox. Of course it may not be as secure, and may not have as many super extensions, but if I'm not coding, IE works for me just as well. Also, it allows you to force links that would otherwise open in a new window, to open in a new tab - s00per!

All in all, IE7 is still a contender. Just need to wait to see how Zune's going to turn out now!

P.s. FF2 has the feature to force new windows in tabs too.

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