Attack of the iClones

December 21, 2007

CES in Las Vegas is now the place to take the pulse of the industry. It starts a scant two weeks after Christmas—time enough for dealers to see what did and didn’t sell last selling season and to start girding for the next. One thing that clearly worked this season was Apple’s insanely great iPhone, which (as usual) captured its unfair share of sales and celebrity. So it’s no surprise that the current CES PR email blizzard should bring an announcement of Shiro Corp’s trio of “slender and lustrous” personal media players (PMPs). Their industrial design makes them kissin’ cousins to Apple’s iPhone. And why not? Apple’s high end entries (iPhone, iPod Touch) set the bar on style. Everyone else either gets to dance the limbo under Apple’s high bar or tries to hurdle it.

Technical specs on Shiro’s three new PMPs (VJ, MR, MD) are not unusual. They’re flash-based players with 4 or 8 Gbytes of internal flash storage, various size LCD displays, and the VJ and MR players have micro SD card slots for storage expansion. They handle MP3, WMA, and WAV audio. Each supports a different set of video-file standards. All have FM radios and can record off the air.

These technical specs are just the price of entry into this sort of market. Sleek industrial design now matters more than ever in the cutthroat CE market. Shiro (a subsidiary of Singapore’s Aztech Systems Ltd) clearly realized that.

Posted by Steve Leibson on December 21, 2007 | Comments (4)

January 2, 2008

In response to: Attack of the iClones
Jonathan Williams commented:

Right on Moe. The "buried" controls on car radios are maddening to say the least. Thank goodness my VW has a radio with separate knobs for each feature instead of forcing you to sequence through a menu list to get to the parameter of interest. There is no excuse for such crappy engineering. The program managers for those devices should be forced to live in the world they create, including a difficult to read screen, obtuse graphics, multi-level menu hierachies, and tiny buttons for flushing their toilet and turning on the reading light.

December 28, 2007

In response to: Attack of the iClones
Steve Leibson commented:

Moe, that's one particular Star Trek episode I try very, very hard to forget. Personally, I'd agree with you that the finesse of the iPhone's user interface is strongy differentiating but the WalMart buying public is not so pickly, I think. Nor are they likely to try out a good-looking player in a package before purchase. Looks can still get you a long way in this society.

December 28, 2007

In response to: Attack of the iClones
Moe Rubenzahl commented:

Color me skeptical. Remember the Star Trek in which an alien, Trelane, kidnapped Kirk, Spock, Uhura, etc. and hosted them in a reproduced 18th century parlor? Spock noted that the food was a visually exact reproduction but had no flavor because Trelane, having only observed it from light years away, only knew its appearance and not its substance? A shiny black device with a grid of colorful icons on a touch screen does not an iPhone make. Will these stylistic knock-offs match the finesse and panache of the original? I'm betting not. It's really too bad but poor user interface is so common. Some manufacturers don't get it and don't even know they don't get it. I am currently wrestling with the menu systems on a Toshiba DVD and a JVC television. I rented a Ford Focus (I had another not-nice name for it) last month and it took me longer than I care to admit to figure out how to change the bass control! Arg.

December 27, 2007

In response to: Attack of the iClones
constantin.grecu@gmail.com commented:

Here's a device everyone wants to heve. I would be very happy to be able to use it just now. I recommen d it warmly.

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