Many of us own an iPod, we’ve both got one, we know most of our subscribers are using one for our podcast, and we get on just fine. But theres many people out there who just cant stand them and all that they stand for, they want something different, an mp3 player that not everyone else has.

so we have taken it upon ourselves to take a look at a few of the rivals, we got alot of the information for this from www.anythingbutipod.com so go take a peek. Please note these players I have never used so all the info here is just a summary and comparison of what other reviews have written about each player.

So the biggest rival to the ipod is in most peoples minds Microsofts Zune player, it got it release a couple of years ago in the states but it was only recently unleashed in the UK not so long ago, and quite frankly it has failed to impress on these shores. I never see anyone using one or even talking about getting one, it seems the Zune has flopped over here. Im not entirely sure why, similarly to the iPod and iTunes in comes with accompanying software, “the Zune Marketplace”, i tried to download this to give it a test drive a while ago to see how it works with our podcast but unfortunately there is no mac version. I have a sneaky suspicion that this player is just a re hash of the ipod and offers no real improvement, apart from an inbuilt fm radio receiver. Heres a link to the specs of the most popular zune player, the Zune 80

Now lets take a peek at a real rival to the iPod, the Creative Zen player. This thing has got everything, and plays pretty much any type of media you could want. Its pretty much half the weight of the zune player, this is due to its use of flash memory (memory cards and the like) as opposed to a hard disk, it also has an expansion slot so you can add extra memory to it. We believe if your looking for a media player that isn’t an iPod you should get yourselves one of these badboys. for all the specs of this player click here

Both of these players are compatible with enhanced podcast so you’ve got no worries if you want to ditch you iPod but want to keep the Pushcast, and even if you have a player that wont play our enhanced podcast we have mp3 versions available for you.

Heres a list of some of the more popular players on the market.

We heard of the news last month that Microsoft had beaten of rival internet giant Google in its bid to buy a share in Facebook and we also heard recently that Facebook is going to launch its version of Myspace music, Facebook Music.With the ever increasing popularity of facebook as a social networking site, it seem only natural that artists want a page on facebook to showcase there music and spam us all with there latest releses. Artists already use the iLike application on there facebook hompages to do so but the new version of facebook is supposedly going to make it much more user friendly for everyone. So we’re more than sure that the Myspace executives are getting a little hot under the collar. Were positive Myspace wont fade into nothingness straight away but it seems with the ever increasing popularity of facebook and the ability to throw sheep at each other with the “Superpoke” application that Facebook music may take Myspace’s crown as “(instert artists name here)’s fan club website”, as that is basically what myspace is, one giant fan club!So onto the next point why was Microsoft so desperate to buy that share? the BBC tells us here how much was paid, and its alot!There is speculation in technology circles that Facebook launching the music pages and the looming launch of the Microsoft Zune mp3 player in europe is one reason the bidding war was so bitter. Is the most popular download store on the web about to be upset by the social networking phenomonon? Push Music believes it could be about to happen. If the guys at facebook are worth there salt, they would have realised what a goldmine they may be sitting on. By offering legal downloads over Facebook music and allowing only the Zune to play them, just as iTunes only allows the iPod to play its downloads.The next few months could prove to be an interesting time for the music industry, so could we see a MySpace and Apple colaboration any time soon? who knows but it certainly would make sense for Apple to tap into the established artists pages on MySpace, and we think this may be a viable solution if Apple wants to stay ahead of the game.