Many of the early Sondigo Sirocco customers are asking me about a couple of things:
1. When are you going to do a Mac driver?
2. How can I plug my iPod into a Sirocco?
I will leave question 1 for another blog entry, but for question 2, I can say that we're not really trying to address or compete with the iPod-as-home-audio-device. Personally, I don't see the iPod as a very good home audio device simply because it is not online. The iPod isn't "live": it is a little island of content that is only as up-to-date as the last time you synched it. Because I don’t have a commute which means I don’t drive very much I don’t really keep my iPod synched. I use it when I travel, sure, but that is only once a month these days. What I find I really like to listen to is the latest news, podcasts, music streams and more live stuff. For some reason I am not really listening to music I have stored. This may be a passing phase, however, and I could go back to my music collection, but in terms of setting up the home listening systems, I am using the Sirocco more and more, simply because I can get ANY audio to WHERE I want it, whenever I need to. If it’s live news radio, great, podcasts fine, music from the collection, also fine. I am using iTunes to play things back (mostly) and to keep podcasts synched, but my iPod rarely gets plugged in (so it’s battery is frequently dead…).
I think the competition
I think the competition between ipod, sansa, zune, creative and other is really tough. That’s why each of them is trying to differ some how. I’ve read (http://go.shopsansa.com/) that sansa launched new product – sansa fuze so they are trying to keep up. I can not say that all players are comfortable to use but they have a lot in common