the j. botter weblog

Okay, Microsoft.  If you REALLY do come out with a wi-fi enabled portable media player this November, it’s going to be hard not to love you. It’ll be even harder if all the stuff Engadget says about the new player ends up being correct, and knowing Peter Rojas like I do, his information is most likely dead-on.

Here’s what Peter says is in store for Microsoft’s new baby:

• Will have a screen that’s larger than the current iPod Video. That’s not tough to beat, because that is a pretty small screen for watching movies or television on.
• Built-in Wi-Fi connection for downloading music without having to connect to your computer.
• With the wi-fi, you can also connect to a new social network for music fans. This right here is a huge selling point for me.  I hate MySpace and love last.fm, so if it’s closer to the latter, count me in.
• To attract current iPod users, Microsoft will also allow you to download (from Urge) any songs you have purchased from the iTunes Music Store.  This is a huge, HUGE deal, and if it ends up happening, it’ll be the biggest shot I’ve ever seen anyone take at Apple’s dominance in the digital music medium. They will actually scan your iTunes folder for purchased tracks and automatically download those from Urge.  Microsoft will still have to pay the fees to the rights-holders of the music, but they believe that taking that financial hit will be good in the long run for getting users to switch over to them.

If it’s well-designed and easy to use, I’m going to buy one. Here are a few things you need to keep in mind when designing and manufacturing this thing, however:

• It must be a fine-looking piece of machinery.  The iPod is popular because it’s simple and it freaking looks great. Get somebody to design this thing that has a radically different point of view on design from everyone else in your company. I realize that there’s already an internal design making the rounds, and from what I can tell it seems like you’re on the right track in this area, but make SURE that the final product you release is sexy.
• The internal software must be simple to use. Radically simple. Don’t copy Apple directly, but use the iPod software as a starting point. Every PlaysForSure player I’ve ever tried out (with the exception of the Toshiba Gigabeat S) has been incredibly difficult to navigate. Make it easy on us to get to our music and video and to make playlists, and you’ll have a dedicated userbase.
• Open it up. Don’t make me use Windows Media Player to put my music on it. If I want to use WinAmp, let me do that. I know you can’t get it to connect with iTunes, but at least give us other options besides WMP. I’m not a big fan of WMP, even the new version that everyone seems to love, but that might be because I’m so used to iTunes after all these years.
• This one is obvious, but make it easy to use with Windows Media Center. I have a WMC laptop and I’d love to be able to easily record TV and radio shows and then have them wirelessly sent to my Microsoft media player while I’m sleeping.
• On the wi-fi end, it would be nice if you could set it up so that I could subscribe to podcasts on my laptop, but even if I’m not around my laptop I could still get them sent to my player via wi-fi. This would be a HUGE deal, especially for those of us who love to listen to podcasts. You could have a central server with my podcast subscriptions on it, and if I’m in a wi-fi area I could automatically download new shows.  Man, I would LOVE this option.
• If I were able to wirelessly send my photos from my camera to my Microsoft player, and then have the choice of uploading them to Flickr or other photo albums, then I’d be hooked.  Even if I couldn’t put them on Flickr but could just use the player as a backup drive for those times when I want to take a ton of photographs but didn’t have a way to back them up, again, I’d be sold.

I realize I started rambling here, but I’m actually excited about this player. I’ve held off buying another iPod because I wanted to see what hits the market in the later parts of this year, and if this thing is for real, Microsoft might have another customer.

Does anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft is starting to become a really freaking cool company?