Hello,
I do not normally sing the praises of gadgets. I am not even the type to buy them, but the commercial-free wi-fi subscription music model was intriguing, and I gambled on the Connect when it first came out. I’ve enjoyed it, but was frustrated that it was necessary to rely on my computer to find particular music and then download the songs/albums to the Connect in order to play them.
And when I first purchased the device, the reaction from others was, well, ‘nice’, but many didn’t like the idea of paying for music they wouldn’t own or they didn’t see clear benefit over other forms of subscription services. Wi-fi by itself wasn’t a strong enough inducement to get them past this way of thinking.
After the recent update, reaction from friends and family has been markedly different. Hooked up to the stereo, it now performs a couple of simple parlor tricks that elicit ‘wow!’s:
- Play ‘stump the Connect’. Ask a friend to name any artist & song. It now takes less than a minute to find & stream the music.
- While a song they like is playing, hit the ‘find others albums by this artist’ button and easily pull up & play everything that person has ever done before.
- When the weekly entertainment section comes out in your newspaper, pull up & play the albums of those in town that week. It makes decisions on who to go (or not to go) see easy.
There is no need to use the computer to find or store music. No time spent on synchronizations or managing huge libraries. No real need for YMJ at all. No need to make decisions about buying particular songs. No getting stuck with bad music. No guilt about pirated songs. No advertising. And with SSID support, it works at work now too!
The Connect is a universal remote control for music. The access is now so seamless that it feels as though Yahoo’s music catalog is my music library.
Yes, I have ideas for improvement, and yes, I am concerned about the future of Yahoo To Go service (which I understand is no longer selling annual subscriptions for Connect users), but for now I feel I am living in music nirvana and just wanted to share the joy.
Thank you Sansa, Yahoo, & Zing for the truly cool toy!