Zune to sell one million by June
Microsoft MP3 player exceeds expectations
Microsoft expects sales of the Zune MP3 player to hit the one million milestone by the end of June, almost eight months after the product made its debut. Apple on the other hand has sold 100 million iPods since its launch in October 2001.
Microsoft's iPod-killer took the form of the Zune MP3 player, which we looked at back in February, and in addition to its late arrival, the restrictions on shared music and less-than-perfect build quality meant this incarnation at least, wasn't going to suppress Apple's idolisation just yet.
Jason Reindorp, Microsoft's marketing director for the Zune, told The Washington Post,"The one million unit milestone is just one conservative step of many we'll take over the next few years as we continue to introduce new features and devices and build our brand."
Many analysts believe Microsoft is ahead of schedule in its slow but steady attempts to take some of the MP3 player market dominance away from the iPod.
Tim Bajarin, president of technology research firm Creative Strategies, told The Washington Post, "I find it [Microsoft's sales numbers] very surprising. But in comparison to Apple's numbers, that's extremely tiny."
COMMENTS
Yawn....
Apple sells 1 million of those ipods per week if not per month.
Talk about a total waste of time and effort.
Besides.... why would I Wan't to buy something that means...err...well..
My challenge to the masses is that you look up "zune" in other languages.
You WILL get a nice little shocker.
By the light...
So... MS expects the Zune to have shipped units to the tune of 1million. By June. So long as we fudge the figures.
Mmmm...
Zune's June Tune Rune!
the future is bleak
If even Apple realise that the portable music player is going to be all but usurped by multi function mobiles I don't see why MS bothers.
And in reference to Blain. There are plenty of phones out there with good GPUs right now. The nokia N93 is the best example. TI have made great strides in fitting more and more power onto single chip solutions and getting power consumption down. You have to remember that the resolution is also a fraction of PC screen sizes so the graphics overhead isn't nearly as high. We won't get XBOX standard graphics for another year or two though.
Oh, and I think Highlander's idea is a good one but MS has already lost the PDA war. Java ME rules the roost in mobile games and Symbian in smartphone OS choice.
I don't think anyone really expected Microsoft to win this thing
After all there are several decent MP3 players on the market that haven't made a dent in Apple's market share, so a flawed device is hardly going to be a world beater.
I'm surprised they've SHIPPED as many as 1 million units, never mind what they've sold.
As for the PSP, it's not a failure, UMD movies are. Personally I've bought quite a few, but mostly on the 2nd hand market, I won't pay over $10 for one - and I think most people feel the same way.
Not when you can buy a 4gig memory stick for less than $100 and swap out up to 4 or 5 movies at a time. Get bored of those just delete them and copy 4 or 5 new ones onto the stick. And it won't be long before 8 or even 16gb becomes affordable.
5 minute halo
What would be interesting would be a report by EB games et al regarding their in stock/sold numbers, to give a better estimate on how many sales were full sales, and how much of it is simply channel-stuffing.
Regarding gaming pdas, time and moore's law will prove me wrong, but for now, I can't see something as complex as halo scaling onto a pda without massive compromises. Doom is too different, in terms of hardware demands, to ensure Halo's runnability.
Doom came out in 1993, on a single floppy disk, requiring 4MB of Ram for your 386. There's versions of Doom ported to digital cameras, even. While a PDA is more powerful (200mhz ARM chips, last I recall), it still lacks the cpu, ram, and gpu for the graphics. And if it did have such, it'd have an even shorter battery life than an UMPC.
(Let's take a moment to imagine Halo's speed and graphics quality on a 386. Or let's be generous. A pentium 166. With a voodoo card. On two 9-volt batteries.)
Yes, I know of things like Metroid on the DS or Me and my Katamari on PSP. But those are custom-built, taylored to the unique traits of those platforms, like dual CPUs and a single known gpu. And an entire scene is less complex than Master Chief's model.
Direct X and the game would need a massive redesign in order to fit with the limited processing power, limited battery power, limited bandwidth, and unknown inputs. And that would defeat the purpose and negate any pda advantage.
On the plus side, we've still got minesweeper. And Wordpad. And we all eat our meals with swiss army knives, because they've got more features than a fork, right? Right?
