g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
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Friday, December 17, 2004
11:46 - Unconvincing Spam

(top) link
Well, they're trying.

I don't know who sent this piece of spam (who ever does?), but it's just too silly to escape comment.



How about that? Not only can you fit 100GB onto this 20GB device (or so the convoluted wording leads you to believe), it can also apparently play Audis. BMW apparently had better get its act together; they're falling behind in the "can be encoded digitally and played back through headphones" technology that their rivals have perfected. Oh, and lest one think this is merely a simple typo, like all the other typos:

The all new DMC 8270 has features that you won’t find on the Apple iPod, including FM Radio, Digital Voice Recorder, Direct Digital Encoding and it can be used as an external hard drive to backup important computer files. It provides support for not only MP3 and WMA files, but also Ogg Vorbis. Its high quality metal construction is closer to a fine German automobile than what you expect from a portable music player; and at only $249, it is $50 less expensive than the inferior featured iPod!

The Fine German Automobile music-player line they're talking about, incidentally, is this one—several products confused into one. The one with all the storage capacity is the compellingly named DMC Xclef 500 (apparently it's an OEM'd Korean device); charmingly, the company links to several independent reviews of it, all of which seem to be trying to put as good a face on it as possible, yet include pictures that completely blow the illusion. There's this one, which shows you the petite size of this "Ultimate iPod Killer":



And this one, which shows us what an awesome interface it has:



Wow. Nice fonts, guys. Apple, what were you thinking?

The most successful of the pseudoPods—namely, the Creative Zen one that's on all the billboards as part of that marketing blitz they announced—stake their case on the fact that their devices do stuff like FM radio, which the out-of-the-box iPod doesn't. I've wondered whether that feature is a good enough differentiator for anybody; certainly it'd be easy enough to add an FM tuner as an iPod accessory, but packing it into the iPod's case would make it too big—as big as, for example, the Xclef thing. And some reviewers, like the second one noted above, seem not to be aware of the fact that their iPods work just dandy as USB/FireWire hard drives, and the fact that the Xclef does so—and transfers songs by making you drag and drop them into the hard drive, lacking sync software—is not a point in its favor.

Regardless, I don't think Apple has much to worry about right away; certainly not for this shopping season. I think if some parent bought one of these spamPods and wrapped it up under the tree for his rosy-cheeked teenaged kid, he'd turn him into a parent-hating depressoid Goth overnight.

Get with the winning team, guys.



(Thanks to Kris for graphing Apple's numbers.)

UPDATE: Chris M. takes these observations off in a different and startling direction:

Actually, there IS a market for these things. There are parents who
will buy this at Christmas time, thinking they've got the latest thing
for their kid at a cheaper price. I know this because my parents, God
bless them, did it every year. They didn't know computers from
transistor radios and they definitely didn't know what was cool and what
would be dorky and uncool. I'd say, "Oh... thanks!!" cringing inwardly
but trying my best to look happy and excited.

Yeah, it made me cringe back then. Now I look back on those uncool
gifts and I love them for it. They had no idea what was cool, they
couldn't have cared less, EXCEPT when it came to buying a gift for me.
Then they asked their other clueless parent friends and did their best
with the budget they had. Now I think of all those gifts that
languished in drawers and closets and the main thing I remember from
them is... how much my parents loved me.

Ayup.


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