I kept eying the Zune, and went back and forth about 5 times before buying it. The things about it that appealed to me were: the form factor, the capacity, the interface, the build quality, the battery life. The things about it that prevented me from buying it right away were: the fact that it’s made by Microsoft, the fact that it’s completely non-customizable, the poor reviews of the Zune v1.0 software, the fact that it can’t act as a USB host, and mostly because you can’t access the Zune device without using the Zune software — and it’s locked down pretty tight.
I have the Zune now for a few days and my first impressions are as follows:
The Zune device is well-made. I really like the size and shape — it’s almost perfect. The screen is awesome. The interface is surprisingly good and is fast. I like the touch pad (squircle). The sound quality is very good. The wireless capability is actually pretty cool. I can sync my Zune over my 802.11g WLAN at home (supports WEP, WPA, WPA2, TKIP, AES) without connecting it to my PC. I wish it had equalization controls like the original Zune, and more tweaking options like my old iRiver.
The Zune software is better than I was expecting. It does have some strangeness to it, but it works fairly well. For me, it’s main shortcoming is that I can’t customize how it presents my music collection. You have limited sorting options as to how the contents are displayed. It’s not a show-stopper, but it’s worth mentioning. I haven’t played with the online aspects of sharing yet via the ’social’, but I will get to it in time. In order to participate in this stuff you will need a Windows Live account, although you are NOT obligated to share your Zune collection if you don’t want to.
So far, I am impressed with this little device, and I don’t think that I made a mistake buy buying one. It looks like it will last a long time, and I can only hope that future firmware and software updates will address some of my gripes. Overall, a very impressive second effort by Microsoft. I think they got it right this time.