Toronto - IPods rule the world. My mother has one. When your parents adopt a new found technology, you know the company has done its marketing well. So breaking this mp3 player market is probably pretty hard. Despite it’s dominance, the IPOD is not without it’s flaws. Ask anyone, most IPod uses have probably had more then one. Why? who knows. I have had two, my first was the 3rd Gen 15 gig Ipod (the one with the 4 buttons on top). The battery died, and I am too lazy to replace it. So my second Ipod was the 8 gig Nano that was recently introduced. I’m happy with it, but not THAT happy with it. So when I was given a chance to take a look at the new Zune from everyones mortal enemy - Microsoft, I decided, hey why not?

So here is my initial review of the Zune.

The Packaging: Sexy

Theres really no other way to describe it, the box and color scheme looks slick. I recieved my zune along with in-ear headphones and an ac adapter, both of these sell seperately (the Zune recharges via ze computer). Now I don’t know, but if you are trying to tackle a market that’s being dominated by a giant, you might as well throw in an AC Adapter. Whatever, that’s my opinion. Lets take a look at the Zune itself.

Once again, good looking stuff. You can never go wrong with black. I don’t know mang, me and my roommate both thought this packaging was slick. Makes me feel like I’m in the future. So what do you get with all those boxes? Lets look:

So basically, you get standard earphones, a USB connection and three different earpads. Not too shabby. Once again, I like the black of it all. Maybe I have jungle fever, I don’t know.

Specs
According the Best Buy, here are some physical details:

Battery Life Up To 24 Hours Audio/ 4 Hours Video
Charge Time 2 Hours (90%), 3 Hours (Full)
Display 1.8″
Size 41.4(W) x 91.5(H) x 8.5(D) mm
Weight 47 g

Look and Feel: Slick and Solid
The Zune has a slick metalic feel to it. I like it. It feels solid and looks like it can take a beating (no testing of that). It doesn’t feel like it’d break if you drop it, like my old ipod did.

Interface: Pretty good
Lets face it, me, you, your friend Beth and some guy named Slava in Croatia are all used to the Ipod wheel format. So it took me a long time (still adjusting) to get use to the touch pad. I’m not really sure how it all works still, you can either slide your thumb left or press left to go forward, slide up or press up to go up, etc. It is easy in concept, but when I want volume to go up, I still do the whole wheel thing.

All that being said, the interface is pretty nice. It lets you choose a picture you uploaded as the background, and the words are nice and big. It gets bigger as you highlight it too. Here you can see the the music side of thing takes a top menu - bottom menu approach:

The transparent layering is a nice touch, and its fairly intuitive. The screen is a decent size too. Now the nicest thing about the Zune’s display is when you pick a song. The album cover pretty much covers the entire screen:

That’s pretty damn cool.

Sound Quality: The sound quality is good. My coworker said the DSP on the Zune is remarkably better then that of the Ipod, I’ll take his word on it.

FM Tuner: The Zune has a FM tuner, which is quite useful, if you want to listen to crappy radio station music. I don’t. But for some people, specially the ones I have shown the Zune, they are like ‘wow, a fm tuner’. My real question is - where is the AM Tuner? I can listen to sport games and stuff with that.

Complaints: First of all, it took me a bloody hour to install the Zune software. It was bitching left and right about .net framework, having to update windows, etc etc. It was a pain in the ass and I almost gave up on the Zune right then. Once I got it working, it wasn’t that bad, but I still use winamp. I don’t think you should have to run ‘Microsoft Update’ for installation of any program, much less a mp3 player. What if I had an illegal version of Windows? I’d be screwed. People who have a lot of mp3s, tend to have illegal versions of most programs. While they might not be your target market, these fuckers are the people who’d shell out money to buy stuff on the first day too. Something to think about.

There is no equalizer on the Zune, so if I wanted to pump up the bass and lower the treble, that is not an option. However, the music sounds excellent anyways, so that’s not a big deal. I also wish I could customize my menus, so that when I turn on the Zune, I can just go right to my playlist. Ipods let me do that. Another complaint is that there is no time display on the Zune.

Initial Conclusion: I really like the Zune. It’s not as crappy as a lot of Microsoft stuff, which is a nice surprise. The feel of the Zune and the interface is a nice touch as well. If they could improve the accompanying software, I would really like the zune.

In the next part of the review, I will go over the wireless feature, the ’social’ community, and maybe the video player. of course id need to find another zune person to test this wifi feature, so who knows when that part of the review will go up.