Zune to sell one million by June 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 …
Let me get this straight? They are out whooping it up because they might sell 1 million by June? It's not that they have sold 1 million units in * 8 * months, it's that they might have SHIPPED 1 million by June (9 months?) If perhaps 15% are in channel and not the hands of consumers that's still only 850K actually SOLD.
And people called the PSP a failure? At last count it's sold approximately (25.6 million shipped by the end of March 2007 + 2 months of sales/shipments and a price cut since then) 1 million units a MONTH...
I thought Zune was going to be the mighty Microsoft's entry into the handheld market?
What I have *never* been able to understand is why Microsoft's moronic minions at Redmond have not capitalized on the biggest handheld market around, the PDA market. They had/have a huge market of PDAs running a Windows variant. Why in heaven's name haven't they bothered to commission some decent games on these devices and perhaps even a reference platform for a home PDA that includes a couple of shoulder buttons and an analog stick, perhaps even a half decent GPU to help with the graphics. Heaven knows that every PDA running a version of Windows will also run Doom. Why not a PDA running a version of HALO? Instead of trying to out-smug Apple with a music player that can be all things to all apples, perhaps MS should have lent on it's strengths as a suppliers of superior FPS game platforms? (OK, now I am being silly I know, but...PDA HALO!! Come on, tell me no k=one wants a hand held capable of running HALO? You know, MS is first a foremost a software company, they could do pretty well by embracing the PSP as a platform and producing some killer games. Heaven knows that the DS can't support a standard MS software stack. It would save them a fortune in development costs (hardware) and I wouldn't be surprised if even Sony were willing to give some preferential terms to Microsoft to get some more killer(pun unintended) games on PSP and further their competition with Nintendo.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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