So the Zune HD has been announced. I’m sure the Zune fans are very excited by the news, but gosh, you’d think they could have made it look a little less like the Apple product…
And yes, I will admit that I have an iphone (I’ve mentioned it before), but I’ve had a lot of mp3 players in my time. I remember my Rio Karma. It was a great player except for the fact that you had to smack it every few days in order to get the hard drive to spin up and it took FOREVER to transfer your music to the thing. Simple lcd display and joystick control, but it fit the hand, and I liked it. I replaced it with a series of iRiver players. I like iRivers. Very nice file management, most of them play off files, and they’re nice to look at, but iRiver has stepped away from large capacity players and only supports a player for… about an hour before dropping a new one on the market.
When I finally broke down and bought an iPod, it was for the very simple reason that it had a large enough hard drive and was cheaper than the other options (Cowen, etc). I actually never liked the click-wheel interface, but it worked as advertised and was easy to rip and transfer music to with iTunes. I upgraded to the iphone so that I only had to carry one device around (though I gave up storage space which means I have to manage playlists (ugh)… I would LOVE a 60gb iphone, but a hard drive is a battery drainer).
The built-in HD radio in the new Zune is a neat feature, but I can’t imagine it being enough to convince me or others to start carrying a second device again. Going against the iPod Touch, I expect a lot will depend upon whether they’ve gotten IE mobile to be a decent browser experience. Mobile Safari is a tough act to follow (though I suppose if the Zune had… you know… flash support, that would probably go a long way). I’m not sure I can be made to care about the HD (720p) output capabilities of the Zune HD. They are marketing as the perfect integration with the Xbox 360, and if I already had an xbox 360, why would I be playing files on my TV from the Zune?!? That’s just another set of cables to manage, thank you very much.
In any case, I’m open to surprises, so maybe this third iteration of the Zune will just be super fantabulous. I guess we’ll find out in the fall.
You mean people actually buy Zunes? I don’t know anyone who has one, they all have several iPods. One for work and others for something less likely to be stollen or broken in a restaurant.
Well, I don’t care for stollen myself, but I suppose that if it had an ipod inside, I might be willing to try it. 😉 In any case, I know several people with Zunes, but they only bought them when they were on clearance for $39!
I’ve never owned an iphone, but I’ve certainly seen ads for them (and my brother swears by them), so I know what they look like. By the looks of the Zune hd (from the actual press release – kudos, again, for the turnaround time!), a heckler (or a naturally inquisitive/honest person) would have a lot to say in regard to the similarities! As far as the Zune, period – I only hear about it in television and movies (free commercials for sponsors – yay!).
Yeah…I’m sure the Zune is a fine hardware, but Microsoft needs to get it together. It won’t play their own PlaysforSure music, it uses software other than Windows Media Player to manage it, and they really want you to rent your music. Whatever.
I do actually plan my scripts out in advance, but if I see something in the news that I want to comment on, I will usually push the schedule back and whip up an impromptu comic rather than wait for a hole in the planned rotation.
The last big news about the Zune was what….? That leap year bug thing in 2008? Where tonnes of Zunes crashed? Hmmm….
Yeah, but this one is gonna be perfect… really… you just wait and see… you’ll be squirting songs before you know it…