Highly revered PC columist Walt Mossberg has not too many great things to say about Microsofts new Zune MP3 player. He has got his hands on one and put it threw it’s paces and has quite a detailed column on it. The link is below but I have pulled some of the main points out for you
Personal Technology — Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal.
Placing the Zune next to the 30-gigabyte iPod provides a strong contrast. The
iPod is thin, sleek and elegant looking. The Zune looks big and blocky,
sort of like a prototype for a gadget, rather than a finished product.
It is longer, thicker and heavier than even the 80-gigabyte iPod, which
has more than twice its capacity.
This first Zune has too many compromises and missing features to be as good a choice as the iPod for most users. The hardware feels rushed and incomplete. It is 60% larger and 17% heavier
than the comparable iPod. It has much worse battery life for music than
the iPod or than Microsoft claims — at least two hours less than the
iPod’s, in my tests. Despite the larger screen, many album covers look
worse than they do on the iPod. And you can’t share music libraries
between computers like you can with iTunes.
But it’s wireless music-sharing feature on the Zune is heavily compromised, in a
way that is bound to annoy the very audience it is targeting. Each song
sent to your Zune from another Zune can be played only three times and
is available for playing for only three days. After that, it dies and
can’t be played again unless you buy it. Even if you play the song only
halfway through, or for one minute, that counts as one of your three
allowed plays. In fact, in my tests, a song I sent to my assistant’s
Zune expired after only two plays, one of which lasted just a few
seconds. Microsoft attributed that to a bug that it said would be fixed.
The
Zune’s other big plus, the big screen, is similarly compromised. While
it is three inches versus 2.5 inches for the iPod’s screen, it uses the
same resolution. That combination can make images coarser and grainier.
In my tests, on photos and videos, this didn’t matter much, and the
Zune did a good job, even automatically switching into horizontal
screen mode. But images of album covers often looked fuzzy, grainy and
even distorted on the Zune when compared with how they looked on the
iPod.
And for a product that’s all about
“the Social,” Zune is curiously lacking a very popular iTunes feature
– the ability to view and to listen to another user’s music library
over a local network. This iTunes feature works in homes, office,
college dorms, hotels, and other places, and it functions in mixed
groups of Windows and Macintosh computers. But with the new Zune
software, you can share your library only with Xbox game consoles, not
other computers.
Consumers may well choose Zune for its big screen, which looks great
with photos and videos, for its wireless song swapping, or for its
FM-radio capability, which requires a $50 accessory on the iPod. Others
may favor Zune because they are as tired of Apple’s dominance in music
as some folks are of Microsoft’s dominance in computers.
ButZune has only around 100 accessories at launch, versus 3,000 or more
for the iPod. If you have any iPod-specific accessories, they won’t
work on the Zune. Also, none of the songs you may have purchased from
Apple will play on the Zune, unless you undertake a laborious
conversion process. Apple is rumored to be working on an all-new iPod
with a screen as large or larger than the Zune’s.
Zunemarks an unusual turn for Microsoft. The company is abandoning its
favored business model, where it builds software platforms and then
lets other companies make a wide variety of products that use that
platform. Instead, Microsoft is building and totally controlling the
whole chain associated with the product: the hardware, the software and
the online music store. Songs sold on Zune Marketplace are intended to
play only on the Zune, and Zune players won’t be able to play
copy-protected songs bought elsewhere, even at other online stores that
use Microsoft music formats.
Microsoft was driven to this approach because its platform model, so successful with
personal computers, has failed miserably in the music category. Apple
has simply rolled over all the hardware companies and online stores
that were built around Microsoft’s previous music system, called
“PlaysForSure.”
Zune comes in threecolors: black and white, like the comparable iPod, and brown, a daring
color for a consumer-electronics device, but one that has become
popular in the fashion world. Each model also has a second color on a
translucent band around its edge; the brown one is trimmed in green.
The word “Microsoft” never appears anywhere on the Zune, only the new Zune
logo and a cheeky, “Hello from Seattle” in tiny type at the bottom of
the back of the device. The Zune’s tag line, evident immediately when
you open the box, is “Welcome to the Social,” a phrase meant to stress
the device’s wireless song-sharing feature, and to reach out to the
Zune’s target market, young music lovers who build social relationships
around favorite songs and artists.
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