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Will Microsoft's Zune Get Its A** Kicked by a Teenager?

Wireless friendship-generator for the... iPod, of course!

Mar 15, 2007 11:03 GMT  ·  By
One of the few pictures of the device. More and professional expected.
   One of the few pictures of the device. More and professional expected.

The iPod has it all, I'd say. From being wide spread across the planet to all sorts of third-party devices and docks and cushions and shells and socks and tiny speakers and underwater kits and everything else you might think of. Now, it's not a bad thing; it's just me not that much in love with this kind of behavior, the "oh mighty iPod, here we praise you and everything we do is for you"-thing.

Nevertheless, this new thingie comes in as a serious threat on the Microsoft Zune-to-Zune broadcasting gimmick: should it work as advertised and should it get some improvements, things are heading towards a gloomy sky with Zune. Shortly, this is what's going on...

Some teenager student thought of how cool it would be to have a device that broadcasted the content you're listening to from your iPod to your friends' iPods, so you can share the music experience. Technically, this teenager grew sick of sharing the wired earphones and wanted something running wirelessly do the same thing.

Her father didn't waste too much time and has quickly engineered such a device and it looks like it's going to be a bang: practically, you insert a signal cable from your portable player in the gimmick and it will broadcast what you're listening to to other friends who also have iPods AND the gimmick set on the same channel (a total of 5, 2 memorized).

The radius is so far about 15 feet (so it's likely that you'll be rather piled up upon should you broadcast a really cool song) but things can change, don't they? It currently sells on ebay for roughly 60 dollars and it's yet premature to make some predictions regarding future prices.

Very easy to operate and running on a single AAA battery, the NoeStringAttached (not such a great commercial name, IMHO) is one device to keep our eyes upon and watch it battle with the Zune. Finally, I feel like saying this one more time: if it get improvements soon and gets a cooler name and "future looks" it's almost sworn to be a "David kicks Goliat's a**" thing. Watch a NoeStringsAttached TV news here.