I thought this was disabled?
Anyway, Microsoft’s decision to include ads before its limited section of apps is a boneheaded, short-sighted move that will guarantee that the Touch destroys it once again this Holiday.
Well, at Apple’s event it said the Nano is still far and away their best selling iPod. And that’s very much just a dedicated PMP.
I think it’s mostly about price. But the Zune HD really does have the potential to be more like the iPod Touch in its multi-function-ness than just a PMP. All they need is a REAL app store, with submissions and approvals and…well…basically just the marketplace thing they’re launching with Windows Mobile 6.5, only for Zune HD. The hardware is there, the software is almost there, it just takes the will and investment from MS.
Sending songs directly over WiFi to “nearby” Zunes is gone, yes. But you can send an album or artist to any Zune Tag or email address. There’s a little envelope icon when you’re browsing artists/albums/etc in the marketplace on the device.
I don’t think MS including ads in their free apps is necessarily boneheaded (they’re short an don’t interrupt the game itself, just show up before loading). That’s not what will make the Touch destroy it. If they did that, but also had a real app store where devs could could make and submit apps and get revenue splitting and stuff, like they’re doing for WinMo 6.5 and Apple does, then it wouldn’t be a big deal if MS’s free apps had an ad. The isn’t “apps with ads” it’s “ONLY apps with ads, and only from MS.”
Of course, the other reason the Touch will easily dominate is that it’s sold all over the damn world, while MS seems content to fiddle around in the U.S. all the time.
Adding 10 seconds to loading is a pretty big interruption.
The player loads the app while the ad plays. The ad probably adds a few or a couple seconds, but you can’t count the full length of the ad as “added time.”
Are you defending full screen ads being shown before apps/games launch? Really?
I’m somewhat of a Microsoft fan (not in the same way people are Apple fans, but I like Microsoft more than your average person does because their dev tools are so sweet) but their recent push into advertising is a bit worrisome. It isn’t just the ads on Zune games, it is the ads on Xbox Live (even if you’re a paying Gold member) and other places too. They are really starting to get a bit overbearing with their push into advertising. Probably because Ballmer is hard up to beat Google at something. Calm down, Steve, and stick to the core competencies.
Before free apps is fine. If that’s their revenue stream to keep apps free, I can live with it. I get something and they get something.
If they start including them in paid apps, it’s a totally different matter.
I’d prefer an option to pay for the game and remove the ads completely. This seems like a win/win situation to me, because I can try a game (And deal with the advertising) and then if I like it, pay to keep it. And if I don’t like it, I can just remove it. Meanwhile Microsoft gets compensated for whatever “free” time I spent playing the game.
The problem with advertising, for me, is that the advertising will become annoying as it becomes repetitious. Also, I believe it’s a slippery slope that will eventually lead to games showing me a second ad as I clear a level or whatever. Fine if someone wants the game without having to pay for it. But give me the option of paying and opting out. Reminds me of the Gizmondo.
If I shell out $200 for a Zune HD, take it home, start playing around with it, see ‘ooh, chess app I can download’ (as one of a handful of games) and wind up watching a Kia add, I don’t feel like a valued or respected customer, I feel like a hostage or a chump.
It’s like if I bought a Lexus and flipped down the sun visor for the first time and there’s a Panera Bread sticker on the vanity mirror.
It’s all about viewpoint. I can go out and spend the same $200 for an iTouch and log into apple and simply not get a free chess app in the first place. It’s odd to me that this is being held up as the gold standard, but it is.
… except that with the App store, you can get a non-Apple made, free chess app without ads. And a thousand other free apps, most without ads.
One of the things about the Zune HD that IS cool is the fact that you can hook it up to a real HDTV and watch 720p movies with (from reports I’ve read) very silky smooth and high quality playback. Granted, this is a limited-use feature, and isn’t enough to push me over the edge to buy a Zune HD, but there are times I’d love to bring a movie over to a friend’s house who has an HDTV without having to resort to optical discs, which are so very last century.
Just because it can do it technically doesn’t mean it can do it practically. I felt a bit burned by the old Zune, and haven’t much charity toward MS’s efforts here, as they seem to have decent ideas that are constrained by many marketing and DRM desires that make the product much less flexible than it ought be.
If MS has a problem, imo, is that it’s not really “Microsoft”, but several internal noncompeting departments each with their own goals and targets, which when taken together lack a coherent strategic vision about all the products in their portfolio. Every now and then you get a housecleaning purge like the death of their internal games studios, but such behavior is not visionary but death-by-accountant.
I can also do that with my Blu Ray player which doesn’t need to be hooked up to my TV set (because it’s already and always hooked up to the TV). Oh, and I’ll see your 720 and raise you to 1080p.
I’m a gadget geek. I really wanted someone to talk me into a Zune, just because. Problem is, the Zune fails to do a bunch of things that the iPhone already does (and that “bunch of things” happens to be thousands of Apps; DennyA may not use any of the apps on his iPhone, but that’s him. I have two full pages of apps, not all of which are games, and I use/play them frequently.) The neat things that it does do, other things I already own do better–like the video playback, for instance.
I know the iTunes software is bloated…but it has gotten much more functional and useful, and the bloat meant a lot more on my 2003 machine with XP and 2gb of RAM and 200gb of storage than it means on my 2009 machine with 8 gigs of RAM and 4.5 TB of storage.
Now you’re just argumentative. It doesn’t interrupt the game. If you think a 10-second load interrupts your life that much, well, fine.
Again, the ad-supported nature doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the overall quality and quantity of the games. And the weather app is pretty lame, too. The calculator…is a calculator.
I’m gonna go ahead and say you’ve never actually been a hostage. Television must make you totally impotent with rage, what with all the ads there.
It’s a freakin’ 10-second ad, people. So that you can get the game for free instead of for $2-5. There are ad-supported apps on iPhone, too.
Actually, I just went and timed it and it’s more like 5-6 seconds.
Would I prefer if there were no ads? Yeah. But I would much more prefer there were a lot more apps, and a whole app SDK and submission process and so on to make a real app marketplace.
We don’t want a 10 freakin’ second ad though, and particularly with all the other shortcomings of the player (non-adaption by anyone but reviewers in particular), why on earth would they put in yet another reason not to buy the player? Do they need the money that much? Gimme a break.
I don’t have an iPhone, I have an iPod Touch. Because of the fatal flaw of using phones as multimedia players: Watch a movie and your phone battery’s half-dead. Someday this won’t be an issue, but it is now.
He’s talking about having a pocket, portable player.
One reason I’m tempted by this capability is travel. Most decent hotels nowadays have LCD TVs with accessible HDMI inputs. I can bring a Zune HD and cradle and bring my own shows to watch when I’m on the road.
You COULD pack your Blu-ray player on a trip, but that’s kinda not the same.
Also, the ad isn’t delaying anything. It’s just showing while the app is loading. The free app.
I just tried to load a few games on my iPod Touch.
Sky Burger: 12 seconds
Lemonade Tycoon: 18 seconds
Cannon Game: 8 seconds
Jelly Car: 5 Seconds
Topple: 10 seconds
The Zune apps aren’t being “delayed” to show the ads - load times are comparable to the iPhone/iTouch.
Most of these games showed URLs while loading - essentially advertising the publisher, even though I paid for some of these! The horror!
I agree, it’d rock to have an app store, SDK, etc, and I hope that happens. But Apple didn’t have those either when it launched the iPhone, and the Zune HD is playing catch-up, so I’m not surprised it doesn’t.
And frankly, I’d rather see the team focus on creating the best multimedia player possible rather than doing an app store anyway, because realistically, it’d take a decade to pass Apple at this point.
I AM surprised. It reminds of devs who create MMO’s that are not like WoW but ‘will be more developed in the future’. Who the hell is going to wait for ‘the future’ when they can have WoW now? That makes no sense to me. MS knows what it’s up against, why can’t it compete with a player that competes. They know damn well that one of the biggest attractions to the Phone/Touch is the App Store, but they can’t be bothered. So what the heck would any intelligent consumer do? Buy a Zune and wait? Or buy a Iphone/Touch and have what they want right now?