| Thursday, November 16, 2006 |
08:53 - The Landscape of Dorian Gray
http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/15/zune-review/
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Someone in the comments of this Engadget review of the Zune sort of inadvertently brought up an interesting point, when saying that compared side-by-side, the Zune's screen looks like it makes better use of space:
Just that comparason of the front sides of both Zune and Ipod, the ipod looks realy horrible, with its small screen and large wasted space for the click wheel.
It's an interesting point in that when placed up against the Zune, the iPod does look like its design is a waste of available space. But key to understanding why it's laid out the way it is is realizing that Apple declined to go the variable-orientation route that Microsoft has chosen.
In an absolute sense, the Zune's variable orientation does make for a more flexible viewing experience; though the screen resolution is the same as on the iPod, you do get to view your videos on a larger piece of LCD, and that's got real value. But Engadget discovered some of the drawbacks of this decision, such as that the compass points of the directional control button can't be labeled, because their functions change depending on how you've got it rotated. Furthermore, the Back and Play/Pause buttons—which they couldn't get away with not labeling—have to be used sideways if you're in landscape mode. Also, I'm not sure which way is up: are the controls on the left or on the right? (Though I'm sure that would be plenty obvious after a little bit of usage.) And having to switch orientations depending on what you're doing is just a plain old distraction, something people don't necessarily want to have to deal with in casual usage. Still, it's a real plus that the Zune seems to make much more efficient use of its available space, fitting a screen that's that much bigger into a package that's not really much larger than the iPod's.
Apple decided not to go the variable-orientation route a long time ago, though; and I can see why. It simplifies packaging, software, and presentation. You never have to wonder which way is up or what the buttons do. Instead of making you turn the screen vertically to scroll through long lists, and then horizontally to watch widescreen videos, it makes a compromise that sacrifices absolute screen size in favor of navigability and a generally TV-shaped screen like we're all used to.
But I also think it's a decision dictated by the scroll wheel itself: it has to be a certain size in order to be efficiently manipulated with your thumb. The wheel on the nano is a bit smaller than on the full-size iPod, but it's still bigger than the D-button on the Zune. And that's what suggests what must have been a proposal that crossed someone's desk at Apple:
And that's just not a very handy shape to stick in your pocket.
The Zune is just about the same width as the iPod, but it opts to turn the screen vertically, to take better advantage of its rectangular shape and smaller controls. In other words, it's exactly the layout that an iPod would have had if Apple had decided to use variable orientation. The difference is that because the iPod's scroll wheel is inherently larger than the Zune's buttons—and all self-contained in a circular package, to boot, so it can't be broken out to fit better into the available space—the packaging options are limited in a way that the Zune's aren't. One might fairly call this a limitation of the iPod's design, true: you can't dictate ease-of-use by beating someone over the head with explanations and rationalizations. But there's also real value in Apple's keeping to the scroll wheel paradigm; it is, after all, their trademark, even if it's not an objectively better interface. If they went to Dell-style or Zen-style or Zune-style controls, they'd lose a significant measure of "iPod-ness", every bit as integral to the thing's iconic nature as the functionally useless but visually endearing pieces of flair on the front ends of Audis or the C-pillars of BMWs. (Buick "portholes", anyone?)
It also explains why people are waiting so eagerly for the fabled "True Video iPod", the one with the screen that's supposed to cover the entire rectangular face of the device and feature an integrated touch-screen that fades a software version of the scroll wheel into view when you touch it. On paper, it seems the ideal solution. The fact that it would necessarily eschew buttons that go "click" when you push them, and would pick up fingerprints and annoying scratches all the more easily, and would require some extra non-software way to poke the thing if it locked up and you had to reboot it, makes me skeptical that this is at all the solution Apple has in mind, though.
But one thing's for sure: they've got something in the works, and having waited this long for Microsoft to tip its hand, they don't have to rush to get the 6G iPod out in time for Christmas: they can take their time making it awesome, as befits the first iPod in history whose design is driven by genuine competitive pressure.
I'm totally looking forward to it.
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Brian Tiemann
