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Zune

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

So Microsoft has released it's Zune player. As an Apple fanboy, I am of course bound by law to criticize it and explain why it's so crap.

Perhaps surprisingly, this is going to be really easy.

Things the Zune doesn't have:

* Games
* Clock or stopwatch
* Password-protection
* Volume limiter
* Equalizer
* Calendar
* Address book
* Notes

OK, so, fair enough - it's a music player and not a PDA, but the iPod gets a lot of flak for lacking in features - and it does all of the above!

The "music sharing" feature that has been so heavily promoted turns out to completely suck. Music beamed to another Zune can only be played three times (even playing a tiny bit of a track counts as one "play"), and even then it will get wiped after three days even if you don't play it. This applies to all music, even that which might be freely distributable. No distinction is made.

The PC-side software seems to be pretty awful. You can't subscribe to podcasts, you can't use Windows Media Player, you can't play "PlaysForSure" music (haha, ironic), you have to have a "Live ID" and some kind of Zune account, and you may not even be able to get the damn thing installed! Oh, and it's not Mac compatible. It's not even world-compatible, for now, it's only available in the USA.

This is actually all quite annoying, even for me. All competition is good, I don't want Apple to get lazy.

And finally, the Zune's "slogan" (plastered all over the packaging and the web site) is: "Welcome to the social."

The social... what?! Someone tell Microsoft that "social" is an adjective, not a noun.

Update: I just learned that they're not compatible with Vista, either. Brilliant.

Update 2: The bad news just keeps coming. You can't use it as an external hard disk, and despite the long list of supported video formats on the box, all video is transcoded to WMV when copied to the Zune, which is in fact the only format video it supports. Blegh.

Labels: commentary, news, tech