I appreciate everyone's comments. Thanks! Forgive my semi-rant above, but I am trying to give candid feedback on this product from a first-use perspective. While I appreciate the technical capabilities of the SB fans on this forum, the masses do not possess these skills and thus any answer with the word "linux" (or any of its derivatives) is not a solution for me, and most people.
I hope the folks at SD do read this thread. I think the product has some major issues that need to be addressed for this product to survive. It will take Apple five minutes to make a competing product that works with iTunes, works well, and doesn't require setting up a linux box to use. And it will come in a really nice box -- which, btw, SD did well with the little black and red drawer inside its box. Take Sonoa, for example. The big advantage to the SB is that it is cheaper than Sonos. Sonos, on the other hand, just works and is easy to use. Again compare the ipod to various other mp3 players that are probably better and cheaper, but more difficult to use. The ipod is destroying them. Anyway, I guess I had four basic comments in my original post: 1) the remote lacking 26 letter buttons; 2) the Rhapsody search results being horrible; 3) the SN being slow; and 4) no direct, off the shelf, NAS connection. Re 1), no I don't use my cell phone to text. I have both a berry and a regular cell phone. I use the berry for sending email and SMS. Also, this gripe with the remote needs to be taken in context with the SN slowness and the crummy search results problems. If I have to press the 7 button four times and have to wait two seconds between presses, that is 8 seconds to enter one letter! Then, if I don't enter the complete name (e.g., Carole King), I get back 275 search results (see the Rhapsody post mentioned above). Ugh, then I need to start over. Next time, I just enter the full name (which takes about 2 minutes to do and two years off my life) and wonder whether I really want to sign up for Rhapsody. I presume whether I sign up for Rhapsody matters to the folks at SD as they probably get a piece of the action. Re 2), I read the Rhapsody thread and I appreciate the complexities of the problem. That said, the thread was from April. Where is the fix? I see several great suggestions, both recognized by Real and SD, so why does the product still have this problem at Christmas? Re 3), don't blame Verizon FIOS. It is not a slow ISP. And if it is, it is state of the art. The slowness is SD's problem if they want to sell the units. They need to figure out a way to fix this. For example, why does every letter I enter need to go back to the SN? Why can't I enter a whole word and have it then get sent as a bundle back to the SN? Sort of the same way that I am entering this post -- the whole post gets sent at once. I don't expect it to instantly start a song or log into the squeeze network, but there should only be a couple of times, when I experience latency. Not every time I press a button. Re 4), I don't know linux and don't want to. I just want to buy a music player. I don't want to leave my computer on all of the time, but would be happy to leave a NAS on all of the time. Whether this makes sense or not doesn't really matter because it is driving how I spend my money. Which I am happy to give to SD if they make a product that can fill the need. Sonos does, but it is more expensive. I am willing to give up the fancy remote of Sonos for less money, but expect similar features -- like the ability to read music directly from the NAS without any hacks. Again, sorry for being critical of the SB and SD, but unless you can tell me that my issues above are wrong, these really are unacceptable problems in a third generation product. While this product is great for people who are hard core techies, it will never survive with non-techies who don't have an IT department unless these issues are fixed. -- MattB ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MattB's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=14616 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=41393 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
