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Zune price free fall: The squircle effect

Written by Kostas Tzounopoulos

Wednesday, 19 September 2007

Rumor/Leak: Zune 2.0 Flash Version Photo

The free fall of Zune's price continues on Amazon, which now lists the White Zune for only $149.99, $100 less than its original retail price back in November 2006. Zune-2.0's "squircle" (still a rumor) effects more and more the price of the current version. I wonder what will happen when v2.0 will be released. And by the way do you know another "squircle" MP3 Player already exists?!...

If you haven't read the latest rumors about the Zune 2.0 release date on October 16th, then do your homework first. You will notice in this rumor that the control pad of the new Zunes is called a "squircle" by the anonymous "source".

When I first read it I thought Mr. Steve "squirt" Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, was the new Marketing Manager of the Zune team. Fortunately there is another explanation: A squircle is a mathematical shape. As the name implies it looks like a mix of a square and a circle, but its not a rounded square. According to this wikipedia article, it belongs to a general class of shapes, called "supercircles". It has no straight lines like a rounded square, they are just arcs (click image on the right for larger version).

After our geometry lesson lets talk about law and marketing: I saw in the squircle article on wikipedia that exists a Squircle SD Card MP3 Player! Assuming the Zune 2.0 rumors are true, could this be a problem for Microsoft? Existing patents etc? Searching for it I didn't manage to find much information, except for a (very negative) review on C|Net UK. The link on the squircle wikipedia article is dead (pointing here ) and its unavailable on Amazon . But here is a photo of this beast anyway (left).

Links:
White Zune on Amazon for only $149.99 (Affiliate link) [via SlickDeals ]