Zune wireless feature not so original

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 16 November 2006 20:22

Your IT - Entertainment

While Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that Zune’s wireless abilities are its killer feature, wireless transfer of music on some devices has been possible for years with lots of kids using it everyday already.

Have you got a mobile phone, preferably a relatively modern one, with Bluetooth? If so, you can do what Microsoft’s Zune can do, which is to ‘squirt’ content from one phone to another, pretty much of any brand you can think of.

But before we get into the details, what about some of Microsoft’s new ways of describing wireless transfer? 

‘Squirt’, or ‘squirting’ does seem like a rather silly sounding name for the wireless transfer feature. It almost sounds they tried too hard to be cool, and it actually almost sounds like something else altogether. After all, Zune is a swear word in French Canadian, a word that refers to the male ‘member’. What is it with Microsoft and their faux pas in naming things?

We’d need to find out if a French Canadian is in the Zune development team. If so, he (or she) is likely to one to have come up with this squirting business, and not informed their superiors what it really meant, don’t you think?

I had a think about it for 5 minutes. What kind of word is better than ‘squirt’, but could mean the same thing, is actually used to describe a wireless transfer of sorts already, and actually sounds cool?

How about ‘zap’, as in ‘let me zap you the latest song’ just as people zap the TV with the remote control. Oh well, maybe they’ll change the descriptor for squirting content to zapping it with the Zune 2. Until then, Microsoft wants you to squirt, and squirt often, in the direction of as many fellow Zune owners as you can find.

Ok, enough of the funny business. What about wireless transfer between devices available today? Well, as mentioned earlier, it’s Bluetooth with the latest phones. Modern smartphones from the last 12 months can all easily play mp3s, video files and more.

If those files are loaded onto your phone by you, instead of having downloaded them from your phone operator’s store for music, ringtones and other content, you’ll likely have your content in non-DRM format.

Turn on your phone’s Bluetooth, get your friend to do the same (if both phones don’t already have Bluetooth on), go to the song or video you want to send, then go to the options and choose to send it via Bluetooth.

Your phone will do a quick search, show all the Bluetooth users in close proximity, and after you choose the right person (who will or at least should know the Bluetooth name of their phone, usually the phone’s model number), your friend’s phone will ask if it wants to accept the transfer.

They click yes, and the squirting, zapping or simply wireless transfer begins. After generally much less than a minute, depending on the size of the content you have elected to transfer/zap/squirt, it’s done.

Your friend has the content. It’s that simple, and it’s hardly a Microsoft innovation or a Microsoft first. Kids by the millions with phones at school do it every day. All that Microsoft has done is to use Wi-Fi instead of Bluetooth, and that’s it. Is this really that big of a deal, especially with Apple's next iPod likely to have a similar feature that'll probably be better implemented?

Microsoft thinks it is. Clearly, they have crossed over into the Twilight Zune.