I received my 2 SB3's last week and I must say I'm quite pleased. The Squeezeboxes are finally starting to look as expensive as they are and the display is a huge functional improvement since I'm finally able to read it from my couch. My optometrist was making a fortune out of me ;).
My non-nerd friends are finally becoming interested as well when they see my sleek setup which is no more than a SB3 connected to two Active Studio Monitors. Less is more... But when I return to my laptop and try to control my 4 zone SliMP3/SB1/SB3 setup (yeah, I'm a seasoned user) I see what is perhaps the most importent reason why the SB isn't ready to be sold in my local electronics store. The server software is wonderful, but the prefered way to control it with the web browser is definitely sub-optimal. Just controlling volume and synchronisation on 4 devices requires horrible amounts of clicking. The way the playlist display refreshes creates it's own problems. On FireFox I find that having a constantly refreshing SlimServer page in the background interferes with filling in webforms. When I fire up IE instead, I'm annoyed by the constant clicking that accompanies the loading of a new page. (anyone know how to turn this off selectively?) I think this is holding back market penetration. Imagine a smart frontend client (complementary to the web interface) with a nice mixer panel that allows the user to easily control his SB's levels. A GUI app that allows him to synchronizes by simple clicking or dragging and that allows easy management of player status and playlists. Wouldn't that be a lot better? It also makes for some nice screenshots on the website. I'm afraid the current website doesn't do a very good job of explaining what it is exactly that the buyer receives. A non-nerd music lover (we're talking 10's or 100's of millions of people here!) would probably be put off by this webpage: http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_features.html Holding off on the technical details, adding a few screenshots with a GUI app that nicely visualizes an SS network in operation (instead of the very boring looking web page) would make a huge difference. OK, for the current userbase the fact that it's in Perl and in Open Source is a huge bonus (I wouldn't have bought mine otherwise) but most of the potential customers couldn't care less. In fact it might even frighten them away because they fear it's complicated and requires knowledge of scary things like 'Perl'... I think the Squeezebox is firmly positioned in the top end of the market. The section where people are willing to spend money on multiple players that work seamlessly together. In my opinion there's a lot of room for improvement in that area. You have a wonderfully mature product that's almost ready to take on a developing market. Why not take it, before Apple or MS does it and leaves us nerds with yet another closed proprietary 'standard'. Regards, Peter _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
