The best portable audio I've ever used (UPDATED!!)

My wife has owned an iPod video for about 6 months, but I wanted the Zune and I held out because I was weary from past experiences about the reliability of Apple products. I was also concerned about the multiple class-action lawsuits against them for various reasons including poor quality of the initial iPods. I know they have defined the market, but I feel their momentum is being pushed by their status as a cultural icon as opposed to any inflated claims of superior quality. The base frame the Zune is built on Gigabeat, already hailed as an equal to the iPod (if not greater) and I knew that Microsoft was going to put their weight behind this in the same way they did with the X-box. I am extremely happy with my decision to wait, this is truly a beautiful piece of technology.

What’s in the box?
You will get a CD with the Zune software, an instruction manual, and a card with a code to get a free Zune Pass trial (description below). You will also get the connection cable, a soft case, a magnetic pair of earbuds (see below) and also the Zune itself.

Screen
The screen will be the first thing that you notice, it is fairly large taking up 2/3 of the surface of the device. Once turned on, you’ll notice that it is beautifully vivid. For normal usage, it is held Verticle with the cover art of the current track taking up most of the screen with the music info below. You can set how much time it will display the cover art. For pictures and video, it is held horizontally. I have kept my entire collection of pictures (several thousand images). You can also set the wallpaper to personalize your Zune. Makes it feel all nice and homey while you blast Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All.

Storage
You probably already know it’s 30 GB, this translates into thousands of hours of music. I have ~2200 songs on it with ~2300 images and I still have 16GB free. It is capable of holding 10,000-15,000 thousand songs depending on how much quality you want. This will satisfy the wild majority of people, however this is still the small number of people who would need the 80 GB rival.

Music
Of course the main reason you want this is because it is an MP3 player. It plays multiple formats including WMA and MP3, however it currently does not play anything off iTunes. The nice part of this is the way that it organizes and plays the music. First of all you can access your music from complete song lists, artist, album, genre, and personal playlists. Spinning through thousands of songs is quite straight forward, just hold down the up/down pad and you’ll see the list of songs on the left whizzing buy, and the alphabet ticking on the right so you know when your close. Pretty easy.
Another nice feature is the organization of pictures by folder. You can also spin through your pictures while your music is playing. When you first play a song, you’ll fill the drive spin up for ~3 seconds. Then this is stored in the RAM while you play around in your pictures. It’s nice when you’re aunt wants to flip through through your vacation pictures and you still want to hear music going to your car stereo, well thought out and convenient.


Earbuds
So these were surprisingly good. I usually don’t have too much respect for the earbuds that come with anything and I fully expected to have to buy an additional pair. However, these supply high quality sound, are stylish with a strip of chrome on the back, and quite comfortable. On top of that, they are magnetic. Weird feature at first until you realize why your earbuds would magnetically snap to each other. How many times do you sit there talking to someone or needing to listen to your environment and still have 1 earbud in? Where is the other one? It’s swinging around, getting caught in your zipper, dunking in your coffee, and just being annoying. With these buds, just take out, and snap to the other, and you’re not putting coffee soaked music into your ear. Very convenient.

Battery
The battery takes only a few hours to charge while connected to your computer and lasts for 12-14 hours depending on what your doing. Having the wireless on will drain the battery faster. Also if you’re constantly flipping your songs and turning on that beautiful and large screen on, it will go faster. I was fast-forwarding songs and playing with it quite heavily for about 6 hours, battery went down to half from a full charge. So it gets what is advertised.

Wireless
I havn’t had a chance to play with this yet, as I’m the first kid on the block. I’m more excited about the potential this holds as opposed to the “social”. Microsoft is being very tight-lipped about what they have in lines for programming upgrades for this feature. I’m sure that part of the issue is the legality of what they want to do. I’m very excited about what this has the potential to become. The ability to transmit and receive also grants the Zune with the ability to pick up standard radio. Not everyone wants to listen to MP3’s continuously. And since combining the radio with pre-recorded music has been a part of portable audio for decades, I’m surprised how few devices have this feature. I’ve found that my Zune picks up radio stations almost as well as any other table-top radio.

Zune Software
So what if IE and Windows media player had a child? It would be the Zune software. Now this doesn’t sound very good, as I’m not the biggest proponent of either. However genetics can have an odd way of recombination. It is possible to have two butt-ugly parents and quite a cute kid. They did a nice job putting this software together. It is a tremendous improvement over windows media player. Menus to the left link you to your Zune, your library, marketplace etc. The right panel is your current playlist, center is whatever you like (be it lists or the marketplace), and the player controls are on the bottom. It has a 5 star rating system. As with the Zune player, it is great at its organizational skills. Additionally, you can flip through your library organized by cover art. It’s a nice way to display all your music and it keeps you in touch with the complete package the artist meant to put together. It also makes things very easy to find. The marketplace let’s you sample 30 second clips of all music prior to download, which is nice. You download buy buying blocks of Microsoft points, it costs about $1/song. It is also well organized and downloads songs in ~10 seconds depending on your connection speeds. There are a few hiccups with the software, but updates have made it work smoother.

Controls
Manual? I know there is one in the box, but I haven’t looked at it yet. It’s dirt simple to operate. You can navigate in multiple directions (song name up/down and album/song/artist left/right) simultaneously. There is an “OK” button dead center, a back button, and a play button. It is truly easy and you’ll be a master within minutes.

Appearance
It doesn’t look like a Christmas tree ornament, like its rival. It comes in the standard black and white, and the rebel brown. They have also just come out with several colors for those that wish to be stylish. It has a soft look and a soft feel. The color is highlighted by the style of plastic so it looks as if the edges light up a little. The buttons are not the focus of the piece, as this is dominated by the tremendous screen.

Zune Pass
Ok, so this is new. For $14.95/month, you get UNLIMMITED downloads. Everything you could possibly want. The catch is that you can’t burn anything and once you let your subscription lapse, your music disappears. The Zune comes with a free 2-week trial period for the Zune pass. In a matter of days I’ve downloaded 25-30 albums. I’m going through it and finding all the CD’s I’ve been wanting to buy, but haven’t. I have bought far far far too many CDs where I only like 2 or 3 tracks, and the rest are crap. Now I can sample an entire CD either at my computer or on my Zune and keep only what I like. It is a great concept. I wrote this before Christmas. The morning before going up to see my family, I downloaded a bunch of Christmas music including the Trans-Siberan orchestra and had something nice to listen to for the two hour drive. The Pass is something I thought was going to be fairly dumb, but I’m truly enjoying it. I’m listening to music I would have never given a chance otherwise.

Zune vs. iPod
So the obvious question is who wins, Zune or iPod. When comparing iPods 30GB model, I see Zune as the clear winner. The only thing as an advantage I see for iPod is a larger selection of accessories, but Zune is catching up very fast. To put it simply, the Zune does everything the iPod can do, in addition to a larger screen, radio, and wireless transfer. I’ve found no real difference between iTunes and Zune marketplace (when it comes to music, Microsoft is working on video content, as it is already available with X-box). Anyone that tells you different is a clear fan boy. I’ll predict that iPods will continue dominate the market for years. But this is where I like Microsoft. They have no intention on making a profit for years. They are putting all their resources behind making a superior product. This will put Microsoft into a very nice place in a few years. I don’t see the whole MP3 player/mobile phone combination being able to completely replace either a good phone or a good MP3 player for a very long time, which seems to be the direction Apple is headed. This year, Jobs decided to show off an iPhone, with the base model of $500 and only 4GB of memory. No one looking for an MP3 player will pick that up instead. The iPod itself may not see significant upgrades until the end of 2008, whereas Microsoft has promised two Zune "events" in 2007. One will likely be the addition of video content to match iTunes, the other will hopefully unlock some of the potential of the wireless. But it may also be the addition of a flash player, which was leacked by www.zunescene.com. I think the next few years will be an interesting race, especially when Microsoft puts out a flash-based Zune and several other devices Microsoft is planning on, such as wireless transfer of music to your new Ford. No connections needed.

UPDATED VIDEO

After a few months of searching around on forums and search engines for a reliable DVD to Zune converter, I found two. One was DVDFab, which isn't marketed as a zune converter, but does have an iPod converstion for DVD to MP4, which the Zune software can further convert. I tried this one first because it was free. The converstion was fairly fast with DVDFab, but the secondary conversion by the Zune software took over an hour. I finally gave up when I realized the DVDFab software was incapable of decoding approximately 1 out of 3 movies, and of those that did work, the video and audio tracks were imporperly synchronized. I ponied up the $30 bucks for Cucusoft's DVD to Zune converter, which takes a long time, but requires no secondary converstion, hasn't failed on any movies, and synchronizes correctly. Long story short, watching movies on the Zune has been my new favorite hobby in the last week. When you have a few minutes to kill and just don't feel like music, it's a great treat to watch Batman in his quest for justice or Bill Murray hunt a resourceful gopher. The video is incredibly smooth, although a better color depth would improve the darker scenes. Another amazing feat is that the transfer of the video from the computer to the zune takes 30-45 seconds for each movie. This is amazing, as the videos are greater than half a gigabyte. A few thousand songs along with a dozen of your favorite movies, this thing gets better every day.


UPDATE II

There is now new software to run the Zune as Microsoft has put out the Zune, 4, 8, and 80. It definitely looks nicer, but there are still significant kinks to work out. It has an issue managing DRM and library management. Hopefully they fix it soon. Wireless syncing is a nice feature for anyone who wants to us a dock at work/home. Very nice feature.

As far as competition, the Zune 80 is meant to directly compete with the iPod classic. As the only thing they did to the iPod was to give it a bigger hard drive, I see the Zune as the clear winner here. I don't really think many people will be considering the iTouch vs the Zunes. GB for GB, the iTouch is 10X as expensive. 8/16GB simply isn't enough for anyone considering 80GB. What I'm more interested in seeing is the response of the market to an MP3player/web surfer hybrid, but I'm getting off topic.