The noble ipod killer strikes fear into the hearts of few

The picture above shows a Creative Zen Vision M stabbing an lowly ipod touch in the face.Time for a (slight) history lesson.

What is a Creative Zen Vision M you ask? It was the Ipod killer of 2006! I got mine that year after I was looking to upgrade from my 5 gb zen micro. It had won the CES design of the year award and had a scroll bar which is something I really like about most of Creative's mp3 players because lets face it, I will be caught dead before I submit to the almighty click wheel. In comparison to the ipod, it shows 200,000 more colors, accepts almost any video format you want to throw at it like avi, mpg, divx, xvid, etc..., it acts like a drag and drop device so that if you don't want to use Creative's software then you can use windows media player, real player or any other windows song organizer to add or TAKE OFF songs or you can simply drag and drop things into the different media folders like a flash drive, it has a video out function that works with any standard a/v cable, it has an fm tuner and microphone built in, 4 hour battery life while watching movies, it is made by the company famous for speakers so the music quality is much better, there is no DRM and it does not have a silly "click wheel".

What does the ipod have over it? oh yeah, its a little skinnier. Woooooo

But really, there have been ipod killers for several years now ever since the rise of the hip and trendy ipod. I would like to credit Apple for really popularizing the digital audio player market even if they stole some of their ideas from Creative in the first place Apple pays 100 Million in Creative patent lawsuit settlement.

So why has this mp3 player not become the great ipod killer many people thought it was going to be and was actually discontinued? Apple was the first and only one to over-saturate the the mp3 player market and so their market share is 72%. They have so much share that only if every other maker out there (Archos, Creative, Sandisk, Microsoft, etc.) pulled all their resources together in a coordinated effort, then maybe, just maybe, ... no. Its not going to happen. They would need a player with three times the features (which would be impossible with a new ipod coming out every 3 months) a quarter of the price and the biggest ad campaign the world has ever seen.

So maybe my picture at the top is but the fevered dream of a madman. But I'm going to keep on dreamin' of a world where the hip and trendy aren't the majority and open source is more common place.

Fat chance.