i love my ipod ... but the idea of a mp3 player that connected to the internet on its own (and then presumably could wireless swap songs between my laptop and the player) would be sooooo sweet. i won't fewer and fewer wires in my life.

If it runs some sort of portable windows then I am going to punch someone in the face. Fortunately with the guy behind the X-borx in charge they will use something different.

Although I don't know why I care, I'm not going to get one anyway...

It can connect to the internet to do what? That seems like a useless feature to me. It would be cool if the devices could connect to each other and transfer songs, but somehow i think microsoft wont go for that.

Wow, you mean a company who is heavily in the computer market is going to further diversify into other related segments? How bizarre.

I'm still waiting for an .mp3 player that will allow you to call the bands directly and bitch them out for bad song writing.

I hate Macintosh.
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.
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but I hate Microsoft even more

seriously, though; i wouldn't go selling you're iPod just yet. Microsoft has the habit of jumping into an already mature market base and failing miserably. They do have a few ingenious products now and then but what they're selling sounds more like a cell phone than an mp3 player. It'll probably flop the the XBox 360.

The engineering rule of thumb: "You know something has reached perfection not when you've run out of things to add, but when you've run out of things to take away." I actually like the pure mp3 players. i cen see watching movies.. but not really. I don't really care for watching videos anywhere if they're on a 3" screen. I can find something else to ammuse myself with.

50 bucks says it will be so frustrating to use you'll just through at the guy infront of you at the bus stop !

My cell phone connects to the intertnet and I don't use that function either. Microsoft wishes to dabble in every aspect that other companies have proven better in. Gates stepping down I'm glad to see hasn't changed the stupidity level at MS.

And this report comes a month before Apple holds their WWDC, the event where Steve Jobs of Apple shares with us miserable cretins what's next in the product lineup... like maybe a new iPod???

i thought it would be a lot easier, for microsoft, to buy creative and put it's money behind the zen. zen already get's better reviews than comparable ipods, they just don't seem to have any marketing/power behind the name.

And if it's anything like the original X-box (as they're being overseen by the same guy), it will also weigh 4000 pounds.

I had an iPod. It only sounded okay, and the battery life blew goats. I have a Creative player now, and I love it. Mircosoft does not impress me. When my Zen Touch dies, I will buy another Creative, pure and simple.

They'll probably only make it compatible with the WMA file format which is far less efficient than MP3s as far as file size goes. *Sigh*

*sigh* i hate this perspective people have, where they seem to think that Apple invented hard drive mp3 players, that the iPod is an original and hard to beat package, and that everyone else is just trying to imitate the iPod.
God it's annoying.
the first iPod hit the market at the end of 2001. Compaq had a hard drive mp3 player in 1999. Creative had one in 2000. Apple didn't invent the concept, nor did they in my opinion even make the best one. Apple yuppies just got caught up in it and created a massive marketting force, and suddenly everyone wanted one.
Personally, I've owned an iPod. and I've owned 4 or 5 other hard drive players as well. And iPod annoyed the hell out of me.
For one thing, they don't play Windows Media files at all (iPod/iTunes users who think they do and are going to pipe up and fight me on this: don't bother, you're really ignorant), let alone WMA Janus DRM 10 protected content, which is what all of the decent flat-rate subscription services use and what I really think would be the way of the future if Joe User would stop thinking his shitty iPod is so cool.
Also, iPod screens have always been two steps behind what other players can do. That having been said, I would consider getting an iPod video for it's 60 GB storage capacity in the size it has, IF it would do WMA DRM as I am on a subscription service. But it never, ever will.
So I'm definitely interested in some sort of microsoft product if it'll give me wi-fi access to my all-you-can-download subscription.

Uhm, yeah no. Microsoft isn't interested in short-sightedly crippling its player if they want to compete with Apple. Of course they'll support WMA, but so does fucking everyone-who's-not-Apple. They'll also support MP3, absolutely guaranteed. It won't support Vorbis I'm sure, as Microsoft despises open source just on principle. It might or might not support AAC though; the format itself has nothing to do with Apple. But it probably wouldn't support the meta-data Apple proprietarily embeds in AAC via their specific wrapper, so music ripped with iTunes probably wouldn't display tags properly. And it obviously won't support FairPlay, but that's not really a relevant concern anyways, as FairPlay can be circumvented by anyone who would go through the bizarre effort to use iTunes with a non-iPod.
iTunes is a piece of poop by the way. (Windows Media Player is worse though, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it)
Anyways, I don't know where you're getting the "fact" that WMA is far less efficient than MP3. "File size" is determined by bitrate, and those two formats share similar available bitrate settings; the debate is which one sounds better or worse than the other at the same bitrate. and the jury is definitely still out on that one. We can be certain that AAC sounds better than both of them, and we can also be certain that Vorbis sounds better than all three. But MP3 and WMA are roughly equivalent.
You can't perform any kind of spectral comparison, as the very nature of psychoacoustic formats means they're screwing with the spectrum in ways you're not supposed to be able to hear. The only way to compare them is to do a blind listening test, and everyone has their own results for that test. Honestly, as an audio professional, I can tell you that under portable music listening conditions, at 192 kbps, or even 160 kbps in normal cases, you're not going to notice any difference whatsoever with either format. So I don't know why you're spouting this propaganda. Thanks though.

Granted, my Sprint/Audiovox PPC 6700 /w Windows Media 5 Edition plays MP3s, so another Microsoft player might do the same.

Can you explain why the file size for WMA file seems much larger than that of an MP3 file of the same music at the same bitrate? File size makes a big difference. It determines how many songs you can fit on your media.

It's simple:

mp3 is lossy.
.wma is not.

I'm assuming you don't know the difference between a lossy format and one that is lossless. A lossy format (such as .jpg) trashes data that it feels is unecessary and results in a smaller file size.

I still use .mp3s over the .wma format as my "untrained" ear cannot tell the difference. I doubt any of the experts at Microsoft can tell the difference without the use of testing instruments. Oddly enough, my hard drive can feel the difference.

Cheers.