My Zune review

  • Article

I couldn't wait for the company store to stock up on the Zune 80 units (they presently only have the 4 & 8GB models) so I went out and picked up one retail.  I guess that makes me impatient :-)  Anyway, so I bought it over Thanksgiving but due to a brief delay in shipping I finally recieved it yesterday evening and I have to tell you I'm very impressed....  Here's my a quick run down of my likes/dislikes.

Like:

1) I love the Zune pass.  This is the all you can eat subscription service for your Zune.  This is now my best friend.  I used to have the Urge service (and prior to that Rhapsody) but neither of these worked particuarly well with whatever MP3 player I had at the time (be that one from Apple or some of the other manufacturers).  Additionally, I listen to a lot of music while I'm coding and the intranet here at MSFT has the horrible side effect of closing my connection frequently in the Rhapsody case (yes, I looked at the proxy settings for those of you who are wondering)...

2) Quick Lists are sweet!  I'm not sure if this was present in the older Zune's but this is really nice feature that my old IPod didn't have.  Nice touch.  Now, if only it had a shuffle feature when playing the quick list (perhaps this is there and I just haven't determined how to use it yet).

3) Presentation.  The UI on this thing is quite nice.  Nice, huge album art which is pretty cool and I love the way that if I have multiple albums from a given artist the album cover is nicely displayed for me..  I don't do a lot of video but the few videos that are included play quite nice. 

Dislike:

1) So, navigation can be kind of funky at times.  It only takes a second to get used to using the pad to move quickly through a list of artists, albums or songs but several times I've found myself accidently scrolling down instead of going down to the next level in the navigation hierarchy.

 That's all I have for now.  All in alll I'm pleased with the purchase and very happy with it.  Congrats to the Zune team for delivering what feels like a pretty awesome product.