November’s Poll Results And December Mini Poll Added

I know the results have been on the sidebar for weeks, however, for posterity's sake I’m posting them here.

November's Poll Question: My MP3 Player Of Choice Is..

The New Apple 4 Gig Nano 2 (10%)
The Victor Reader Stream 9 (47%)
The Icon/PAC Mate/Braille Sense/Braille or Voice Note 2 (10%)
Rockbox Enabled Players 1 (5%)
Some Other Accessible Player 2 (10%)
I Use An Off The Shelf MP3 Player With No Assistance 3 (15%)

In less than 18 months the Victor Reader Stream has dominated the landscape of how Blind people are accessing text and MP3s. Even with iTunes support more readily available out of the box for JFW and Window Eyes, I find that others are still opting for the VRS because the usability of iTunes its self is such a mess. The iTunes program, from my perspective, should be thought of as bloatware or malware in the fact that it pushes so much stuff we Blind users don’t use. The App Store for the iPhone? Whatever.. And the Apple Software Updater is almost as bad as the Adobe Updater. It makes me almost long for the days of the Real Player updates. You had a bit more control over those but not by much. Real Player Games Updates anyone? No thanks. I just want to hear a song. And three pop ups and two tool tips in my taskbar later I finally got to hear that song I forgot that I wanted to listen to in the first place.

A really interesting delema for Humanware will be how they release and market a Victor Reader Stream 2. With so many great features already included in the 2.0 software one would be hard pressed to upgrade to a better model when one finally does come along. That is a real problem for Apple as they too are reaching the end of the feature list for the iPod lines.

Speaking of music, I’ve been listening to the newly combined Serious and XM radio stations. I have my own thoughts about the merger but I thought that this would make a good Mini Poll Question to ask all of you before I pull out another soapbox. So..

December’s Poll Question: Do You Like The New Combined Serious XM Radio?

Yeah
Nope
I don’t hear a difference
Dude.. the radio is dead, I gave up and only listen to MP3s

I’ll run this until the early part of January and then I will come up with something more exciting. We are less than a month away from ATIA and the press releases should start picking up steam again very soon. We may have some neat things to talk about as we stand in the shadow of another version of Windows and Office. 2009 is shaping up to be a weird kind of year for sure.