Transitions

Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP gives a teaser for Microsoft’s next major release, Windows Vista. WMP11 is both sleek and smooth, has glossy menus and, most importantly, works very very well – the learning curve, I must say, is one of the smoothest I’ve seen to date, whether you be a newbie, or a power-user since the good ‘ol DOS days. You’ll actually find yourself torn between your favourite 3rd party music player (mine is “Media Classic Player”) and WMP11.

The only reason I still use both is because MCP loads about 3 times quicker than WMP (0.8 seconds rather than 3 seconds) and also responds quicker and eats up less system resources. WMP11 does give most players a run for its money in terms of aesthetics and supported formats, but it appears that Microsoft’s move to sync the desktop/laptop machine with “portable devices” such as USB Drives, iPODs and PDAs is their next ‘big thing’. However, I think that like Office 12, WMP11’s “ribbon” toolbars is the best feature Microsoft has implemented since the Disk Operating System Command Line.

Is anyone else thinking, “I actually want to upgrade my software” this time around?!!