Alternatives to the iPod

Over 140 million people own an iPod worldwide. People nowadays don’t go out to buy a digital audio player any more, but the go out to buy an iPod. This is a real shame as people fail to understand the potential of the other DAPs on the market.

Creative, Samsung, Sony and Microsoft all have alternatives which are cheaper and better than the iPod. Yet the iPod still sells much more units.

Please, look at everything on the market before you buy an iPod. Please.

External Reading:

• Samsung P2
• Microsoft Zune

The iPhone

I’m not sure if the Guinness World Records has a recognition for the most over-hyped product ever released in an industry, but the iPhone definitely is deserving of such an award. I really respect and admire Apple for their innovation and originality and I see some potential in this product, but it is really not what Apple makes it out to be. Some 2.3 million iPhones have been sold in the first quarter of 2008, and I have to say, somewhere in their HQ in California, Apple has a really good marketing team.

I say this because, comparatively, the iPhone is actually average when you look at the other smart phones on sale. The proud owner of a HTC TyTN, I assure you that the iPhone has nowhere near the “smartness” the the TyTN has. This is, unfortunately, a fact, and you can see it right here. The iPhone doesn’t even have bluetooth! When it comes to style, however, the iPhone excels. The Mobile Mac OS is even more fluid than the desktop one, and everything works like a dream. Other smartphones tend to lose this fluid motion the moment they get filled with third-party software, fragmented files, and excessive memory usage. This is the only advantage I can see to not allowing third-party apps on the iPhone.

Until Now. That’s right, during his keynote speech at Macworld 2008 Steve Jobs announced that the Apple iPhone Software Development Kit was soon to come. Will the iPhone lose the one upper hand it currently has, or will it be able to find a compromise between fluidity and memory-intensive applications. Only time will tell.