Zune Should Go Beyond 'Squirting'

There is something wrong about the squirting thing but hey, lets no go there. Meantime, Steven Levy writes a great piece about the wifi capability of Zune and notes that "Zune is a decent, if not compelling, alternative to the hard-disk-drive iPod". Pretty good from the guy who has written a book on the birth of the iPOD and his excellent article in Wired this month titled The Perfect Thing. Worth reading just for the part where he introduces BillG to the iPOD over dinner.

The wifi part of Zune is the part that excites me the most and this is the core of Levy's article. Zapping tunes to each other is cool but there is a lot more potential. Being able to zap podcasts that are not DRM'ed would be great. I just sat with a journalist at lunch and showed him some podcast content on my Zune and it would have been great to share there and then rather than have to send him the URL to get fetch it himself.

Another potential use is that mentioned by Zune product manager Scott Erickson. He envisages other possible scenarios "like allowing a concert performer to send a song to every Zune in the audience". I recently saw Keane at Alexendra Palace and paid £15 for a CD of the gig that I collected 10 mins afterwards. Would I have paid £10 for a version sent via WiFi to my device that I could listen to on the way home via my in car stereo? Yup, definitely.

Link to Levy: Zune Should Go Beyond 'Squirting' - Next Frontiers - MSNBC.com

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