Tri Nguyen's Profile

I bought a Zune30 off Woot.com for $100 in anticipation for the new firmware. What a great deal for a solid piece of hardware/software. So far I am loving it. Has FM for in the morning at work. Good podcasts support for mornings also. Larger screen for album art and videos for when traveling. And I love the navigation of the music - being able to go up/down and side to side. It makes browsing through your music much faster than the iPod GUI structure. I used to have an iPod, but it died, so I picked up the Zune for $100. Best money I have every spent. Top notch, and does a good job of filling the features that the iPod left out (Wireless sync, FM radio, faster file navigation). While I loved my iPod, I find the Zune to a much more rounded player.

Why are people so hostile to the music subscription model? I seriously don't get it.

People will pay $15 a month for an XM Satellite subscription. They don't own the music that gets played.

People will buy songs on iTunes for 99 cents a pop. If you think you "own" those tunes you are high. You "own" them as long as you only want to play them back on hardware purchased from Apple and/or do whatever other limited things Apple decides to let you do with them.

What about this example. Lets say I buy one CD per month and I will always buy one CD per month for the rest of my life. It costs around $15 per month.

For that same $15 month I can subscribe to Rhapsody or Napster or Zune (or whatever) and I can take every single album in their library and load it onto my MP3 player. I can listen to every single new album released (ok, limited to the library, but they're pretty inclusive now).

The only objection I hear to this is "but if you don't pay, you lose the music." so what. Why would I quit paying? I already know that I always spend at least $15/month on music anyway so why stop?

And it's not like I dont' buy CDs anyway. I use the subscription service to check out music much more conveniently and much more broadly than I would without the subscripton. If I really like something, I buy it on CD and rip it myself. You get much better quality and there's no DRM.

Makes a world of sense to me. I really don't get why people oppose it.

Zune's core layout and navigation are truly excellent. You'll be up to speed in seconds. When you're viewing a category, all the other categories on that "level" are aligned along the top, and pressing left and right on the controls moves between them.

For example: choose Music from the main menu, and you're looking at the Albums view automatically (or whatever view you left it at). Pressing up and down scrolls you through albums with small artwork. But to the right is Artists, then Playlists, Songs, Genres…you get the idea. On most other players, you select Music and then Artists, Playlists, Genres, whatever. If you want to change the view, you have to back up to the previous interface level and select a different view. Microsoft's approach is considerably faster and easier. This works on all levels of the interface: If you're viewing the contents of Moby's album 18 in album view, then pressing to the right and left will quickly flip you to the next albums in your library…1984, 20, Abbey Road, All Killer No Filler, American Idiot…

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I'd like to highlight an innovative navigational feature in the PMC UI that I think of as "horizontal navigation." Microsoft calls it twist navigation.

You may be familiar with the purely vertical navigational schemes of devices like the iPod. In such a device, you're presented with a text menu of choices, through which you can scroll up and down. When you select a menu choice, you're presented with a sub-menu, through which you can also scroll up and down. And as you dive deeper and deeper into the UI, it gets harder and harder to find your way out. For example, to find a particular song on my iPod, I might select Music, then scroll to Artists, hit Select, scroll the to the artist name, hit Select, scroll to the appropriate album name, hit Select, and then scroll to the appropriate song name, and hit Select again to play the song. If I decide to play a different song by a different artist, I then have to hit Menu, Menu, Menu before I can select a new artist. And then, of course, I have to go through the same set of tasks to go find the song. In, out, in out, round and round we go. Each artist is in its own bucket.

The PMC lets you do this if you're a masochist. But it also supports a "home" button that jumps you right to the Start Page, and the horizontal navigational scheme I mentioned previously. Let's use the same example as before to see how this works on a PMC. From the Start Page, you select My Music to see a list of my music. As with the iPod, you do see a list of choices, but this time it presents artist names by default (Figure). You could scroll down the list vertically, as with the iPod, but you can also scroll horizontally to see other choices. In My Music, these choices are Playlists, Songs, Genres, New, Albums, and then aforementioned Artists.

Fine, you're thinking, but the iPod offers some of these choices right in the Music menu. True enough. So let's navigate down into the artist list and choose an artist, like we did on the iPod (Figure). Then, we'll select an album, as before (Figure), and the song (Figure). When we play a song on a PMC, you get a vastly richer experience (Figure)than what's available on any other portable device, but we're going to ignore that for now. Instead, we're going to look at what's available navigationally. So the song is playing, and as before, we want to listen to a different song, from a different artist. If you click Back, you can then move left and right through all of the songs in the current album (Figure). Click Back again, and you can move horizontally through all of the albums by the current artist (Figure). But when you click Back a third time, you can move horizontally through all of the artists on your device (Figure). So why is this better? It's doesn't appear to use fewer steps. But under each artist name, you get choices for playing all, adding to portable playlist, and then a list of that artist's albums. You don't have to go up and down, up and down, to select songs. And you can simply move left and right to get to other artists. Imagine how laborious it would be to create an On-the-Go Playlist with an iPod using a strictly navigational structure. Not only is it easier on the PMC, you get little album art graphics as you navigate through the hierarchy.