Surprise surprise… but I won’t beg to differ, for once.
Best in Show goes to you, Creative Zen Vision:M. I have not owned you, yet, but I’m someone who’s been counting the days until somebody gets the behind of the iPod kicked while my faith in the sacred gadget drains as fast as its battery. Nice job, Creative.
Highlights from the spec:
- 30GB
- comes in 5 colors
- 2.5″ color screen for photo + video
- wma + wmv support (98% of the videos people send me are wmv’s)
- 14 hours audio playback, 4 hours video playback
- pri1 features: FM radio, video output to projectors/LCD TVs
- pri2 feature: 8 preset equalizers + custom equalizer + bass booster
- pri3 feature: voice + FM recording, sync Outlook
- Rockass feature: keyword search on virtual keyboard!
- MSRP $330, Froogle has $230-$330
At this point, I’d call it PERFECT if it supports secondary battery but it doesn’t seem like it from what it shows on the official site.
Lowlights on spec:
- No removable battery
- No support for mov files (popular music video format)
At this point of the spec review I’m ready to pull out my credit card, but having these criteria met will definitely close the loop:
- Solid software functionality (common problem in electronics makers with crappy software) on:
- Media Import/Export (Export painfully lacking on iTunes; DVD ripping sounds too good to be had)
- Tagging, (iTunes does a good job on auto-complete and bulk-edit, but I yearn for more),
- custom name-value tagging (e.g. Ocassion, Personal-Note, Live Performance, Offensive)
- multiple value
- more refined attributes on personel, genre, language (e.g. Lyricist, Arranger, Producer, Drums, Director, etc) (e.g. Ethereal, Gothic Rock, Bosa Nova, Lounge) (e.g. Japanese, Portugese)
- Browse by field (iTunes allows sorting on all displayable field)
- Search (iTunes allows full text search on all text fields)
- Unicode support
- Player functionality:
- Unicode
- Browse by field
- Crossfade playback
- Delete
- Queuing
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