The new iPad

Unless you have been away in space you probably have heard about the biggest bit of technology news this week. On Wednesday Apple released their tablet PC called…..iPad…., wow that was innovative naming. It’s basically like some Apple designer stumbled on the zoom button on their Xerox copier when copying some iPod Touch/iPhone photos.

Anyway with this latest Apple toy you can use read books, surf the web, read your email and more (sounds familiar?). As with the iPhone this new 1GHz device cannot multitask. That feature is probably reserved for the the iPad Maxi which will come after the iPad Plus that has a camera. It’s important not to give a customer all the features at once. How else are you going to lure your blind followers to pay for upgrades?

Also don’t forget the other big news from Apple. The new Macbook Wheel

left right left right left

One of my favourite bands Coldplay is once again giving away free music to their fans. This time it’s the live album “Left Right Left Right Left” which you can download in DRM free mp3 (192 kbps) format. So surf over to http://lrlrl.coldplay.com/ and download your copy today.

Thank you coldplay…

There’s no word on pricing on the website, but I cannot imagine it being any more expensive than Spotify at NOK 99 pr. month. So how does Wimp measure up against Spotify.

Wimp has chosen Adobe AIR as their platform and the player runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and there is talk about a mobile edition as well on the web page.  The client has a fresh and clean UI and for me looks even better than the Spotify UI. They claim to have over 2 million songs in their database, but the best for me is that they have Pink Floyd, something Spotify does not offer.

As with Spotify you can create your own playlists, but with Wimp you can also add artists and albums as favorites, a feature I’ve been missing in Spotify.

As with spotify playback starts in an instance. You just click the song and it starts playing. I don’t know that sample rate or compression they use, but it sounds more than good enough for me.

After testing more, I’ll update the post, but for now this seems good and it has feature the Spotify does not. But even if Spotify is missing my favourite band (Pink Floyd), wimp is missing a lot of others that Spotify has. Which service will win in the end I don’t know, but I feel that paying NOK 100 (about USD 15) pr. month is too much. Unless the price comes down or that the ad-frequency in Spotify goes though the roof I’ll probably go back to free Spotify once the beta is over and wimp becomes a payable service.

See my very subjective feature comparison

Right now I’d say Spotify has an edge, but they need too look out for this newcomer or wimp will pass by at high speed and overtake Spotify and the next stretch.

Update: After listening to some music using a good pair of head phones I can tell you that the quality is less than desired. After some investigation it seems their music is 16 bit, 32 kHz, 64 kbit/s, mp4a AAC SBR (no DRM). It’s good enough for playing though my laptop speakers, or on a mobile phone, but when listening on a good set of head phones the lack of sound quality is clearly present. Before I’m even going to consider paying for their service they really need to up the quality something I’m sure they will before they are out of the closed beta phase.

Read more:
Wimp – Norges svar på Spotify – Digi.no

Mapple – The Simpsons from Mykl i am on Vimeo.