Exercise four-Charles Gao

I am going to compare my recently broken IPod which I hate, and my current mp3 player Creative Zen which I love.

I got my iPod as a gift. If not, I would never buy myself an iPod. There are many problems with iPod.

Affordances: iPod uses touching wheel to navigation and control volume. This I particular had problem with. Touching wheel is too sensitive and therefore easy to make mistakes. It constantly creates trouble when I was trying to select song and adjust settings. When I need to change the volume, I constantly cannot select the right volume I wanted to. Lucky enough there is a constraint of maximum volume in setting I can use to limit the maximum volume, otherwise my ear would probably got hurt by the sound already.

From the visibility side, the screen is definitely visible if you only need to listen to music. However, the screen is not big enough to view any sort of image or words which are the functions iPod support. As the result, these functions are useless.

Other problems of iPod are really crucial too. I can’t delete the songs which I don’t like from iPod directly. Every time I try to delete any songs or add any songs, I must go through the iTunes in computer. iTunes really works slowly on PC and gets lots of music store things inside which I never use. If I use another computer other than my own, I cannot edit any of my songs or receives any songs from that computers regardless if that computer gets the iTunes software or not. The fact that iPod uses its own connection cable provides inconvience of the file transportation.



All the problems above with iPod are not connected with my current Creative Zen player. It gets a completely different design than iPod in terms of affordances. Instead of using touching wheel, it uses conventional buttons to navigate and controlling volume. These buttons are designed very well. They are big enough to press, create no trouble when I carry the mp3 player in the pocket, really accurately doing the navigation and volume control and look simple and pretty. The volume control mapped from low volume to high volume by down and up button during the sound playing mode, it is quite easily to work with.

The size of creative Zen is not big, just like the size of banking card, but it gets a big screen and blue light that indicates player is on. Instead of using portrait display form, it uses landscape display. This change increases the visibility of the player dramatically. I can view photos, videos on it clearly. Interesting enough, even though it gets a bigger screen, the battery life of it is long than iPod if only playing music.

The Creative Zen gets more control options than iPod, but they are necessary in my point of view and not hard to work with. Especially I can delete anything I don’t like from it directly. It can be recognized in any PCs as USB storage and I can copy and paste any songs into it to play with or without software. If I don’t need to use it to view videos, I don’t even need to install any software on computer at all.

It is better than iPod in mostly every way and I have no complains about it.