After blogging about media player 11 and the proposed ideas about it (April 17th,) I thought it only fair to download it and give it a go. I think the beta’s been out a couple of weeks now so I’m sure loads of people have already given their two cents. My slant is my needs, so how does it fair?

First impressions
Install was a little painful. It seemed to take forever on a laptop, whether that’s down to my laptop remains to be seen. I’m sure that will be changed for the better before release though. The other thing that strikes you obviously is the Vista look, all shiny black.

Other impressions
It’s basically still Windows Media Player 10 in my opinion - with the addition of Vista bells and whistles. There is an online store capability though, which doesn’t work in the beta, which is a possible iTunes store beater??

The biggest problem I do have with it though is the exclusion of anything remotely RSS. This is a real shame because I felt Microsoft have seriously missed the boat on the whole podcast/RSS revolution. This new form of media is taking internet users by storm - Microsoft allowing it to be less accessible to the end user with wmp11 can only be a bad thing. Not that podcasting or anything else within the same bracket will suffer, it will just mean that users will stick with their current aggregator and not bother migrating to another iTunes.

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