I joined the Logitech era in September 2009 with two Duets. Although clearly some start-up issues - today it works like a dream. And since then the set-up has been supplemented with a Radio which wakes up my wife every morning with her favorite internet radio station.
My use cases are world wide internet radios, Spotify, podcasts, and the 100s of children stories that my kids enjoy. Spotify sort of replaced the value of my own music library. But not the kids stories! For me, the Duet has been great (after the initial problems were solved - which I also later realised related as much to my wi-fi setup). On the topic of user interfaces. For me, the user interface has three sometimes conflicting needs: 1) You may want a very visual, easy way of selecting music (from Spotify or your own library). Laptops is the perfect solution because of the keyboard (for example running Squeezeplay), Squeezebox Touch probably comes second on this, due to the large screen, and Squeezebox Touch and the Duet controller after that. 2) You may want the device to be accessible, i.e portable and small and with lots of battery time. Now the order of the devices reverses: Duet comes first, then Touch and then a laptop. 3) You may want a super fast access to the most elementary controls - i.e volume, some preset stations or favorites, and pause, fast forward. Often the best solution for this is often hardware keys on a portable device. (So you don't have to select through several screens before you get to the volume control!). The Duet is clearly the winner here! So, buttom line for me is that the Duet controller works for 70% of the cases - when I just need to select a pre-defined radio station from the favorite list, some of the "recently used" albums from Spotify, or a downloaded podcast - and then I can pause, skip and use volume controls conveniently through the hardware keys, even with dirty hands in the hobby room or kitchen! :-) But then when I have more time and can concentrate a bit more - I use the PC (Sqeezeplay) to find new albums in Spotify, latest podcasts, or maybe new radio stations and add them to the favorite list. Here the keyboard comes in incredibly handy. Also because - often when searching for new music, podcasts or radio stations - you actually need Google as well! The Radio is brilliant as a morning clock with pretty good sound, and with the battery installed - the kids take it to the cellar and it has solid enough sound to function as a little minor disco player - and again getting their latest bands (never heard of them) from Spotify. I have an iPod Touch as well with iPeng - so although the initial coolness of an absolutely great user-interface, then in practice, it for me falls in between the issue of lacking the hardware keys for the basic functions - and in practice running out of battery all the time, and finally not really being good enough for searching for music on spotify etc. The laptop obviously beats that. So, in my world, slimdevices and logitech has hit a sweetspot of a range of user interfaces, device hardware and somewhat openness of the system so that new plugins, such as the absolutely brilliant Spotify plug-in serves me everyday. And who knows, maybe next year - I drop Spotify and listen to Google music or something else. And I am hoping.... actually praying that Logitech will keep this alive and developers around the world still find motivation to make new wonderful plug-ins for me! :-) Jesper -- jaaen ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jaaen's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=33625 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=92232 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
