I am for the first time since highschool without an MP3 player.
I’ve had everything from Creative to Sony to every model iPod. One major thing that has turned me off from the Zune was a) 30gb model I would never use that much space and b) it was huge.
I was in CC/BB the other day and saw there is a 4gb model out that is very small/pocket/gym sized, however both in store units at those locations the battery was dead, and they couldn’t find the chargers.
Anybody with a Zune chime in. How is the software? I heard with a reflash of the software you can make it drop/drag with no proprietary software. How is the menu navigation?
I am considering buying myself some more Christmas gifts and this might be one. Any opinions would be great since I didn’t get a chance to actually use the one in store.
Recently I bought the 30gb off of Woot.com for $89 and i’m very happy with the purchase.
-Recent software upgrade looks and functions much better.
-Drag and Drop can be done with reflash/hax.
-sound is good,headphones are good.
-battery life is comparable to your average iPod
Dislikes…
-Can’t be used as a portable hard drive out of the box.
-Wifi is pretty useless
-No wall charger included & expensive accessories unless you go on eBay.
or have a computer running windows just to use your zune.
I agree that it’s silly for them not to make at least a little mac compatibility (i.e. just USB mass storage) but it’s a lot different for them coding for the minority platform than for apple to code for the majority platform.
Plus they’d have to far exceed the user experience of ipod+itunes on the mac to really gain any mac users.
The new zune (80gb) is nice though… even the old ones can be updated to the new firmware to do wifi sync and all that great stuff. My roommate just has one windows computer so that he can use his zune.
Until they get that sorted out I’m stuck using my ipod running rockbox firmware to play my flac
They bash on iPods not being compatible with anything but iTunes, and then they dont allow it to work on iTunes?
Any way, :picard: to Microsoft on that one. I was looking at a 30gb brown zune for cheap to screw around with, but if i HAVE to hack it to work on a mac, fuck it, ill just get a ipod.
This makes at least 4 mac owners I know who really wanted a zune but couldn’t. It’s unfortunate but the costs of software development obviously didn’t have a chance of justifying themselves.
Microsoft takes bit losses on a lot of projects (Xbox, Xbox 360 come to mind) but I guess they decided to try and make the zune project profitable from the start?
Brilliant insight, please share more of your wisdom with us whenever possible.
And when has M$ ever coded their products for the minority share of the market (Apple)? That would make no sense at all, M$ is bigger than Apple, they know it, they want to flex their muscle.
They do it with msoffice but only because their office suite is still the best in the market. They did it with IE (it was pre-installed on OS9 and early OS X, right? so many years ago) until Apple made their own and it was 100x better than the very outdated IE for mac.
MS isn’t going to push themselves into a market where another company has such dominance unless their product is a true 100% winner.
The new zune is… much improved, but it still isn’t there It’s basically like the third gen ipod… yeah it worked but meh… At least they finally added lossless codec support (WM Lossless --compressed better than FLAC on the highest flac compression setting and does it much faster).
I agree with you but unfortunately too little too late even though the first gen zunes were better than the first gen ipods in every way except size. I love mine to death but so many people have alread fallen into itunes and its a good way to manage songs so why would people switch? The new generation zunes aren’t really much better than the last ones except for size and an improved tuner. Its too bad that microsoft didn’t do something sooner but if they did i might not have gotten a brand new zune for $100
^^ I think the wifi sync is a pretty compelling feature (works on the old zunes as well) if you ignore the fact that you still have to plug it in via USB to charge it so most of your syncing will be done then.
The new DRM-free music store is pretty nice as well.
i didnt know they had drm free music now! lol shoes how much i have been looking at it. I just wish i could use it as a hard drive again, that stopped working with the new firmware.
