The Stand-up Philosopher

This iPod Shuffle Knockoff Actually Fooled Me

This weekend was Fireman’s convention in Wildwood, NJ. My father in law is a lifetime member of the fire company, and the family has gone down every year for longer than anybody can remember. I’ve been going down since 2003. Normally we go down on Thursday and stay until Sunday.

The last couple of years I’ve gone down on Friday because of work, or because my wife’s sister worked. This year we didn’t want to burn my meager vacation balance, so I stayed home. I ended up going down on Saturday for the day, then coming home at night. It was fun.

Typical activities in Wildwood during Fireman’s convention involve going to “the tents” and walking on the boardwalk. Wildwood is known for games. Gateway 26 Casino is my wife’s favorite place to go to play games on the boardwalk. She learned to master the crane games there as a little girl. I always thought those crane games were rigged until I saw my wife and her sister empty one once. They’re good at it.

Gateway 26 is a casino, but it’s family friendly. You win tokens, which are redemable for merchandise. I figure it would probably be cheaper to just buy the merchandise outright, but I guess that’s half the fun.

Joshua wanted an iPod Shuffle like device, and they redeemed some tokens for him. Believe it or not, I actually thought it was a shuffle. When I was down there on Saturday, none of the iPhone or iPod Touch knockoffs fooled me, but somehow this did.

Figure 1- iPod Shuffle Knockoff that I fell for

Somehow I didn’t notice at first that nowhere on this device was the apple with a bite out of it. I also didn’t realize that Apple is way too trendy and pretentious to call their products “MP3 Player”. (Yes, we love them for it). It wasn’t until I asked where the data cable was and saw the box that I realized Apple had nothing to do with this fake.

Oh, well. I put some music on it for Joshua to listen to and turned him loose with it. Actually, I wish I was a shuffle. It would have been a lot simpler to just create a playlist in iTunes and sync it.

Microsoft Has No Clue About Digital Media

Apparently, Microsoft is now running commercials claiming that it would cost $30,000 to fill an iPod, but that a Zune Pass only costs $14.99 a month. If you’re not familiar with the Zune Pass, it’s a subscription model for music. Essentially, you pay for a subscription and can listen to any music that you want. That model is in ways better than the “buy a song, keep a song” model, which is better than the “buy a CD with 12 songs, 11 of which totally suck, in order to get one good song” model we followed previously. Of course, that model is bad in the way that once you stop your subscription, it all goes away. Supposedly you can keep 10 songs per month.

Microsoft created it's own competitor to the iPod, known as the Microsoft Zune. I think it came out in 2007. At one point, I briefly considered it but then I got an iPod Touch. From what I hear, the Zune does have better battery life than a video iPod. After the frustrations that led me to dump Windows Mobile for the iPhone, I'm not going to consider a mobile device with Microsoft's name on it any time soon. The Zune is made mostly in-house though. I'm sure the hardware is made with communist child slave labor like the iPod, but the software integration is done at Microsoft.