The Complaint Department: PMPs, Apple, and the American Public

Jeremy Goldstone, technology journalist and social media professional, explains in each iteration of The Complaint Department why technology isn’t conforming to his specific needs right now and why that sucks.

The state of the PMP market today sucks, and it’s not just Apple’s fault. It’s your fault too.

In case you’ve forgotten, PMP stands for portable media player. Basically, it’s the fancy name for MP3 player, when people started realizing they do more than just play MP3s. Which these days, means iPod, iPod, and any iPod knockoff. Maybe it always meant that, but it didn’t have to. But because it does, we, the buying public, are left with the products and features that Apple wants to push and some other brands doing their best to imitate Apple.

Here’s my basic gripe – Apple is all but abandoning the large capacity player format. If you want a device that can store all of your music, plus maybe a couple of movies, your choices are extremely limited – iPod Classic (which now only comes in the 160 GB model), a leftover Zune if you can find one, or something from a brand like Archos that is probably both a: hard to find when not ordering off the Internet, meaning you can’t test it without dealing with shipping, and b: of unwieldly form factor. And gods help you trying to find an accessory. The hard drive player market that allows you to carry your entire collection at once is all but dead.

So realistically, we’re down to a single large capacity player, one that Apple hasn’t made any major alterations to for a couple generations now. They seem to be much happier pushing their flash player lines. Don’t get me wrong, flash players are awesome. They’re lighter, no moving parts, and generally are less of a battery drain. But unless your music collection is small, or of a crappy bit rate, they don’t hold much. I am currently in the process of uploading all my music to the Google Music beta, something that is going to take several days. This 64 gigs in the high-end touch model isn’t going to cut it.

The reason for this is simple: Americans only buy Apple when it comes to their standalone music devices. When another player does enter the market, such as Microsoft, it is derided as inferior, even when the technology may have been better, simply because it isn’t Apple and therefore is an inferior off-brand. So any time a company does try to do a little innovation, they get left behind.

Case in point, the Creative Zen Vision: M. When the ZVM hit the market around 2006-ish, it was undeniably a superior product to that generation of iPod in almost every way. Superior audio quality. Built-in radio and microphone. Better video screen. Drag and drop capabilities, as well as being able to partition off standard hard drive storage space. And the big kicker: it could play DIVX and XVID files without conversion! Something Apple still tries to keep their devices from doing. It was a tiny bit bulkier than the iPod, but still well within acceptable limits, and it could do so much more.

But no one bought it and Creative dropped the line in favor of flash-based players with fewer features and less capacity. Boo.

True, with cloud storage, my phone can hold all my music, plus a couple of movies, and with the right software (yay Moboplayer!) can handle just about any video file I throw at it. But if I’m going for a long walk, or a plane ride, or anywhere without cell coverage, I’m screwed.

Thanks a lot, America!