Two Slashes

I’ve had my Creative Zen MicroPhoto for several years now; I think I’ve had it just about since they came out, in fact. It’s been a great player; it does everything I want (plays music), and everything “just works” (yes Apple, I just used your marketing ploy describing a competitor’s product, shoot me). However, there comes a point where technology becomes outdated, and you need to move on.

In this case, the limiting technology isn’t anything that can be fixed with firmware…I’m simply running out of space. When I bought the thing in the first place, my music library sized up somewhere between 4 and 6 GB in disk space, which was decent enough for me at the time, and fit easily into the player’s 8GB. So I was happy, because I had room to expand.

Well…come forward to today. My media library certainly isn’t 6GB anymore…heck, I couldn’t fit it on any less than about four or five ZMPs. Which of course means that with my increasing library, I have a choice to make in regards to how best to utilize the space I have and what gets prioritized enough to get cycled on and off the player. But it gets really disappointing when I go to look for a song, then have to remember that I cleared it off last week to make room for some other song.

Thusly, I’m in the market for a new MP3 player. And of course, I’ve been looking around and comparing, as any semi-intelligent person would do, at any device that satisfies my needs.

But with the newest generation of players, I think several engineers forgot what the word “standards” meant. And I mean that in a big way.

One of my bigger gripes is with the connectivity of these devices. Go back to a few years ago, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a non-iPod player that didn’t have a standard USB connector on the end. Now, it’s almost the norm to require the use of 2½ breakout dongles just to hook the blasted thing up to your computer. But not only does that mean you need special accessories for each device you get (because face it, they’re already ignoring one standard, what would compel them to come together and develop another), but some of the features they advertise and provide are utterly useless.

Take, just as an example, the all-too-common concept of the mass storage device on the MP3 player with exorbitant amounts of space. By definition, this would be something that I could carry around with me and use to carry around documents and whatever other files I needed to have with me. With something as standard as a USB port, I could simply find a compatible cable (or borrow one from another device I’m carrying around with the same connector, such as a camera) and use that temporarily if I’m away from home. Not so with the proprietary crap of this age, not at all. If you want to store something, you’d better have the cable for your particular device on you, or be able to acquire one in a flash…or you better not even be considering your “proprietary-connector-enabled” device as a storage option. And let alone people who like having a clean desk with few cables laying around - because you can’t use the same connector for multiple devices, you’re either forced to leave a USB port on your desk, or have all the connectors bunched together in one area and connected to a USB hub so that you can pick-and-choose without having to

I was reading some stories on Digg today and came across a rather interesting comment on one of the stories (don’t ask me to link to it; my history list is a mile long) in which someone pointed out a “standard” with smartphones: you can run third-party applications on them. Oh, wait…let me revise that. You can run third-party applications on non-Apple-iPhone smartphones (at least, stock/non-jailbroken ones) . Where along the line did the definition of smartphone move from an easily-expandable, wide-platform device such as a Palm or (uggh) a Pocket PC to something as shallow as an iPhone? Yes, indeed, standards my ***.