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Information was released about it today. It looks better than the iPod.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/14/micr ... -the-zune/

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/pres ... fault.mspx

Specwise it looks pretty good.

Unfortunately for MS, they've got an uphill battle to get any kind of purchase on the online music store front, though I'm sure they'll bundle it into Vista, and possibly even into the Xbox 360, there's always a gap between bundling a paid service and getting people to click on it.

They've also got to fight against Apple's brand recognition, which is a monstrous thing with a life of it's own. (and I don't think that "Zune" is the name to do it)

Also, the black one is the only one that's aesthetically pleasing.

Just having the word "Microsoft" attached will count against it in some quarters.

Hey, that's a pretty sweet album cover.

Vendetta wrote:Also, the black one is the only one that's aesthetically pleasing.

Not so; I think the brown one has a great retro thing going for it.

So do they wholeheartedly steal Apple's UI, or do they have a crap one? Call me nuts, but they seem like the only two options, and if Average Joe can't use one as easily as an iPod, the Zune loses.

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:Not so; I think the brown one has a great retro thing going for it.

I don't like the retro thing. I want Shiny and Modern. I do not accept retro 50's futurama shiny either. I want modern shiny.

Too bad for that, then.

If the iPod taught us anything, it's that art school pansies like Spanky aren't a significant market and can be ignored.

Microsoft has a lot of muscle, but the marketplace already has products 'better' and 'cheaper' than iPods, and they can't dent Apple's dominance. It'll be interesting: perhaps the 360 generation are MS fanboys?

Stark wrote:If the iPod taught us anything, it's that art school pansies like Spanky aren't a significant market and can be ignored.

Bah, I wasn't going to buy one anyway, just saying that I liked it in brown.

My MD player is still good enough for me at this point.

Stark wrote:Microsoft has a lot of muscle, but the marketplace already has products 'better' and 'cheaper' than iPods, and they can't dent Apple's dominance. It'll be interesting: perhaps the 360 generation are MS fanboys?

Not quite. The Xbox as a whole, both versions, shows that MS are willing to sink huge amounts of resource for a return maybe somewhere down the line.

The original Xbox was never meant to make money or fight for marketshare, just to establish MS as a brand in home consoles and fight for brainspace. The Zune may be the same deal. Though if they want brand establishment, they should have chosen a better name than Zune. Which sounds silly.

They announced everything but the price. Hm, interesting, since Apple just announced new, more aggressively-priced iPods on Tuesday. I wonder if Microsoft is restructuring their pricing.

Anyway, we're gonna kick this thing to the curb with the rest of them.

technomage wrote:Just having the word "Microsoft" attached will count against it in some quarters.

Especially when you consider that the Zune will have wireless song sharing with friends, meaning that the only thing stopping it being hacked is security measures provided by microsoft. Sure, I doubt the hacker will be able to do much beyond deleting your songs remotly, but an MP3 player that keeps losing songs still seems unusable to me.

Then again, if I ever get an MP3 player, it will be some cheap one that does what I want it to and not much more. I doubt I'll ever want a portable video player.

I also hear the Zune will attach DRM to songs when they get transmitted wirelessly, too. Details here; keep in mind it's almost all blogs, so take with salt. Yes, even if one is an 'insider' at MS.

The DRM is basicly to control the amount of times you can play a song that is not yours on your player, nothing more.

Ace Pace wrote:The DRM is basicly to control the amount of times you can play a song that is not yours on your player, nothing more.

And that alone is enough to make my descision not to by one.

TheMuffinKing wrote:

Ace Pace wrote:The DRM is basicly to control the amount of times you can play a song that is not yours on your player, nothing more.

And that alone is enough to make my descision not to by one.

Seconded. Feel free to scream "KNEEJERK!!!11!11!!", Ace.

Looks promising. If the interface is better than the mess on the iPod, I might seriously consider one to replace my ageing and dying Rio Karma.

You don't like the 'tiered' thing on iPods? I prefer it to the 'file structure' thing they use on other devices. If you mean all the crazy menus/settings/games/contacts etc, I agree.

I wonder what the wireless thing will do to battery life? It's only going to be occasional, but if you give someone an album worth of songs, how much will that cut your battery life by?

If Microsoft's marketing habits are any indication, by the time this thing comes out, it'll probably have half its features cut and the rest shackled.

But seriously, the article says 'launches' the Zune. That's wierd, seeing how I note there's a lack of price and launch date. Most of the photos look like CG, though the MS site does show an interesting side-view.

Was there actually a demonstration of the technology at a conference of sorts? It doesn't feel like there's a product here.

Stark wrote:You don't like the 'tiered' thing on iPods? I prefer it to the 'file structure' thing they use on other devices. If you mean all the crazy menus/settings/games/contacts etc, I agree.

The tiered thing has the potential to work nicely, but is near impossible to use with a large music collection: Scrolling to find a partiuclar band quickly and reliably is close to impossible: you either have to crawl down the list, and wait to end up where you want, or risk scrolling quickly, and overshooting. Several times. In either direction. If an extra layer was added to each (A-Z, so for example, you select 'Artist', and are then presented by an A-Z menu, select the first letter, then are displayed all bands sharing this letter, ditto for Album and Song) then it would become vastly more usable: and this is a problem which is only going to get worse with the repidly ballooning capacities of the players.

I've never really looked at the games/contacts parts of the menus, whenever I've used an iPod, it's been specifically to play music. I imagine that with a lot of use it would annoy me however... It sounds bloated, and unecassary on an MP3 player.

I wonder what the wireless thing will do to battery life? It's only going to be occasional, but if you give someone an album worth of songs, how much will that cut your battery life by?

I guess there will be a switch to enable or disable (similar to on a laptop, or bluetooth on a phone) it as you want. I'd guess it might take off about 25% of the battery life? Whilst I havn't measured it objectively by any means, that's what I rekon putting a wireless network card in my laptop does for it.