Product Review / Microsoft Zune
Filed in: News and Events
Tagged with hot products, geeks, market,zune, microsoft, mp3, player, wma, itunes
Last Modified Jan 23, 2007 at 08:02 PM PST by prochazkaViewed 669 time(s)
Rated 
by 1 Cylivers
This music player will please most of the users but it lacks in format support and limited Wifi capability.
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The goodGood playback performance, intuitive and colorful interface. Integrated FM radio (with RDS). |
The badVery weak video support and no video offering from the zune marketplace. Cannot be used as a hard drive. Proprietary USB. Cannot use Wifi to sync, stream of purchase content. Not backward compatible with WMA/DRM9 |
Music Player
Microsoft Zune
My rating
One thing that beats me is when you have a great product like iPod, does the world need another attempt at redesigning music players?
Window media partners like samsung, creative, iRiver all failed in capitalizing on large windows base. What could Microsoft do differently? Well, Zune is a different kind of player. It integrates Wifi for sharing of files (limited) in a black, white and brown harddrive based device for photo, video and music. Additionaly, it adds FM radio. Definitely a welcome addition. It runs a portable media center version of windows mobile operating system
What really sets Zune apart from other players is its Wifi capability. Wifi based sharing feature allows users to share music and photos (but not video) within the same room--albeit with limitations that many of us already know: three plays of a song within three days. Shared photo files, on the other hand, have no limitations. This is step in the right direction but not perfect. For example, Wifi does not allow you to sync with your computer or buy a song from the Zune marketplace.
I switched to iTunes long time back but to Windows media fans, it is very frustrating to note that Zune does not support the older WMA DRM9 format. So, all those songs you bought from napster wouldn't work.
Overall, Zune is an excellent player when it comes to just music. All the other thrills and frills need improvement which I am sure is on the anvil.
