bklaas wrote: > > I spent literally months trying to get the alarm in a hardened state. If > it's been screwed up again, sheesh they should just pull the feature. A > faulty alarm is MUCH worse than the feature not being there at all. > It's kind of weird. It really looks like they've gone back to a state BEFORE that activity: all the same issues. No snooze, only backup alarms fire reliably (that is: if you set them INSTEAD of e.g. a radio station). Some people suggested issuing an earlier, silent alarm several minutes before the "real" one to make it fire. With other words: it's completely useless in the current state. > > Podcasts...they get probably 50% of my listening time at home on my > squeezeboxes now, and that's even with the general ignorance the device > has for how to deliver a podcast UI. If squeezebox had both automatic > and manual bookmarking and quick 30 second rewind/ffwd and a reasonable > podcast discovery/browse UI (the only service for this, mediafly, did > not cut it), you could grow the user base for that technology. On-demand > audio streams of stuff-that-isn't-music is pretty untapped, and the > demand could be there if someone would just cultivate it. > That's an interesting point. I had considered to add some missing functionality to iPeng UE.... now, we'll see, nobody really seems to be buying these UE Radios. > > Amongst existing European users, simple internet radio was the single > most important feature, particularly the BBC. In the U.S., by contrast, > it was by far Pandora. Local music use was harder to understand, but > knowing that its use was shrinking was enough to doom it to its current > crippled fate. Nevertheless, the data from Europe (by sales, quite a bit > more important than the U.S. for squeezebox) showed that deferring > sign-in/registration during setup was a very reasonable stance to take. > I believe what's the major misconception about this product was (you can very clearly see that in how they position the UE Radio) that it's a mainstream product. It's not, it's a long-tail product. People may mostly USE it for internet radio or Pandora but that doesn't necessarily mean it's why they buy it. I believe a lot of people buy it (over cheaper alternatives) because it _also_ allows them to do other things, even if that's not what they do with it most of the time. If you have a range of products that all fulfill your basic requirement (listening to internet radio or Pandora) it might still be the one offering the most attractive other capabilities (also playing your own stuff, multiroom, alarm clock.... these things can vary from customer to customer) will be what you buy.
I think that's what whoever wrote the marketing concept for that product didn't understand: if you build a product that only has the features that people use 80% of the time it might be a product that people still won't buy because those other 20% were actually the reason why you chose it over the competition or accepted a higher price. You have to know very well what you are doing when doing market research on these things. That said: BBC is also on the list of things that don't really work well anymore since there's no listen-again support with the UE radio, of course. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96188 _______________________________________________ Radio mailing list Radio@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/radio
