Geeks.com, home of many digital media players, sent in the Zune 120 GB for a spin. In the eve of the upcoming Zune HD release, how do these players stack up against the iPod? Read on to find out.
The Zune package comes with a USB cable and earbuds. It features 120 GBs of storage, a QVGA 3.2″ LCD, touch control pad, FM radio, key lock switch, and wifi. Installing the latest available firmware was fast and easy with Zune’s unique sync application.
The Zune needed about 3 hours of battery charging when it first arrived. It then booted to its main screen in about 5 seconds. The touchpad allows you to scroll up/down, while it also operates as a 4-way button. There is also a “back” button and a play/pause one that also operates as “sleep” and “ON” button. Pressing the “back” and touchpad-down at the same time it completely turns off the Zune. The Zune goes to sleep automatically if it’s not used for about 5 minutes.
The first thing I noticed when the Zune turned ON was that its screen quality left something to be desired. Even if it’s a QVGA screen, it felt much lower resolution than that at 3.2″ size (the same resolution doesn’t look as rough on iPod Classic’s 2.5″ screen). Also, one interesting thing about the Zune is that Microsoft’s logo or name is not mentioned anywhere on the exterior of the device.
In terms of size, it’s bigger than the 120 GB iPod that my husband is using recently. The Zune design doesn’t have the same aesthetics as the equivalent iPod, but it is not distractingly big either.
The UI is pretty neat in terms of usability, but it is not very pretty, it feels a bit depressing at times. Nevertheless, the Zune has the second best usability in an mp3 after the iPod, and ahead of the Creative & Sandisk players. The media-playing UI has a Sony PS3-like interface where you can move horizontally for the main categories (e.g. artists, songs, albums, playlists), and vertically for the elements belonging to each of these categories. You can either use the touchpad to move through these elements, or by pressing the “down” touchpad button. The more you press, the faster it will scroll through the elements. However, this method is not as fast as the iPod Touch’s where you can simply select a character and directly go to elements that start with that character’s screen. Hopefully the new Zune will have this problem addressed, since it’s using a touchscreen.
Everything else is as expected in the player’s UI: right/left buttons get you to the next element, keep pressing left/right buttons will scrub through a song, etc. The only part I really disliked in the UI is that when I click to an album or a song, there’s one additional screen to get it to playback. I am more used to just select a song and it would start playing. Not so on the Zune. It annoyingly asks you if you want to add it to a playlist or not, or send it to a friend. I just want to play the song darn it…
The Zune can playback WMA, MP3, AAC, WAV. It had no problem reading my non-DRM iTunes purchased songs, and my free mp3 songs. Getting the album art right off of our iTunes library proved to be a bit more difficult. Apparently, album art added with the latest versions of iTunes posed no problem, but older ones were not recognized and I had to manually add about 200 albums’ images (out of 1500). H.264 videos for the iPod and WMV videos played without a problem.
I should note here that our iTunes app reports a 60 GB iTunes library (on NTFS), and our iPod 120 GB too. The Zune used 66 GBs of storage for the same amount of songs though. Maybe it’s using a weird filesystem, not sure what’s going on there.
The Zune also has a WiFi ability, but it’s only used either for syncing, or for “sharing”. You can share a song with a friend by beaming the song to his Zune for a few days so he/she can sample it. Then, the song becomes inactive and it’s up to your friend to either buy that song or not. The Zune comes with a “Marketplace” application that let’s you browse the top albums/songs, or search for a song you would like to buy (via WiFi). Unfortunately the input mechanism is pretty annoying, and that makes the music store experience pretty dull at the end.
Two more features on the Zune are its FM radio ability which works well, and five games (Checkers, Texas Hold’em, Soduku, Space Battle and Hexic). Battery life for music playback is rated at around 30 hours which is pretty good. Audio quality was top notch too. I liked the fact that there was gapless playback too.
In conclusion, I don’t see the Zune replacing our iPods at home, but it’s a nice complementary player. In fact, I see more value in also purchasing the Zune Home AV Pack v2, and use its audio-out interface to connect to our stereo system. Given that we now have 60 GB of music and a lot of it is iTunes purchases rather than CDs, we just need a way to listen to that digitally-purchased music via our big speakers in our living room. The Zune 120 GB, with its bigger readable screen proves to be a good fit in that scenario.
Rating: 7/10
I picked up an older Zune 30GB (woot.com) and already had an iPod 30GB. After using both for music, audiobooks & video my choice based on many aspects is the Zune 30.
The screen & video performance is much better than the comparable iPod. The Zune accepts .WMV Files in syncing with solid playback performance. The size of the screen can’t be appreciated until compared to an iPod with a smaller screen playing the same movie.
The FM Radio is a huge plus.
I don’t see the Zune being a serious threat to Apple.
It simply came down to personal choice & preference.
I given my iPod 30GB to my son.
It is a pretty good device but what stops me from purchasing it is the fact that it isn’t Mac compatible; if they made a syncronisation software which ran on the Mac, I’d seriously consider it over an iPod but Microsoft seem to be hell bent on excluding some users from being able to use it.
I also find it funny that it has been out for over 2 years and it still hasn’t been officially launched in New Zealand or Australia yet? have Microsoft pretty much given up already when it comes to competing with the iPod?
Can’t you just run a cable from the headphone out on the Zune, to the input jack on the stereo? I think that most recent stereos have some sort of “multimedia in” (mine calls it a “Mini-disc input,” since it’s a few years old).
That setup works fairly well with my stereo & my roommate’s iPod touch. And after I finally found a free iPhone/Pod app that can receive a live encoder stream, I can just stream to it from SoundPlay on my BeOS machine.
The line-out has much better quality than the headphone-out jack. Given that we have some amazing speakers, it will be a shame to not use the best possible way to get good quality out of the player.
A line-out is unamplified vs a headphone jack which is. I could see how doing it twice might cause a loss of fidelity but I don’t see why they can’t just provide a switch or two out ports on the player. I bought a 2GB mp3 player two years ago for less than $70 that did this.
Looking at the new Zune side-by-side with an iPod made me think of a typical 1959 Soviet automobile.
It’s not the new Zune.
Just as typical as everyone else in the world.
The wifi is also available for games programmed with XNA. XNA is free and allows programmers to program applications for the Zune. I made a game for the Zune once which used the wifi capabilities quite a bit. I definitely prefer the Zune over the iPod because I can program games for the Zune using Visual Studio.
In order for Microsoft to dethrone Apple. I see to ways they can do it.
1. Make a superior version of its product. That will put the iPod touch to shame…
2. Make what they have but Much cheaper like hundred dollars cheaper.
Right now. They are really just an iPod clone that cost just as much more or less. I don’t see microsoft being visionary enough to make a vastly superior product. But what they can do is make them cheap. Then they could win. Otherwise even if the Zune is slightly better and slightly cheaper the market isn’t going to change.
If Microsoft created a device with the emphasis on freedom of data they could carve out a market.
I love the zune for the radio, but it s a pain in the ass too because of:
– No marketplace for canada
– Doesn’t support WMP f or syncing, only crappy zune software
– No way to drop files/musics on zune as an external drive like I did on my creative device
– I had to use hard reset at least 4 time this summer
– Doesn’t use mini-usb standard like my old creative zen v did
but the radio’s great and despite these setback I bought a new one recently, cause I still like zune software more than iTune and the radio is just essential these days.