Poll Position as on 4th Sept
Well, early stages yet in deciding India's favorite media player, but a pattern has begun to emerge. WDTV has been holding the leader's position right from the beginning, with xtreamer following hot on its heels. Playon was in the hunt initially, running neck and neck with the top two, but has lately begun to fall behind.
The others, I'm afraid, with the way things are going will, in poll-speak, probably forfeit their deposit.
These results are not unexpected given that the top three in the poll are the ones about whom most queries are asked, the ones that get most discussed and also the ones about whom most owner-reviews are posted, on this and other Indian forums.
So is it a title fight between WDTV, the champion, and Xtreamer, the contender? I think what puts Xtreamer and Playon at a disadvantage
vis a vis WDTV is that they don't have a dealer and service network to speak of, and their products have to be bought sight-unseen outside of their home cities. Plus WDTV does have the first-mover advantage.
The others, like Asus, Seagate and Iomega in spite of not being essentially one-man operations like Xtreamer and AC Ryan, still can't make a place for themselves in the market. AND they have bigger and more known brand names behind them too!
The reason why Popcorn and Dune don't make a mark is obvious - too expensive for a product that is still in the early-adoption stages of its life-cycle!
But apart from dealer/distribution and availability factors, what is still open to debate is which is the best player, feature-wise. Do WDTV/Xtreamer score heavily over the others here, too? Only experts or people who own/have seen more than just one of these players in action can answer that.
So, let's see if these positions change or remain the same, and hope there will be a few surprises!
hyeah:
