First Look: Microsoft Zune

Yesterday’s future, today.

Introduction
It’s no secret: to wrangle the ‘most popular MP3 player’ crown away from the iPod, the Zune has an uphill battle on its hands. Apple has a five year lead on Microsoft, is the king of legal online media distribution and has a downright erotic player. Microsoft has folded to record companies by granting royalties from the sale of each Zune and taken design cues from the original Palm Pilot, circa 1997.

For us, the Australian consumers, there’s another hurdle for the Zune to clear: it has to be released. Up until recently it was slated for Christmas, but Microsoft has pushed it back, and we should expect (read: hope) to see it on the shelves some time early to mid 2007.

It is important to note that this is not a review per se, because when the Zune does hit the shelves, there will be a localised music Marketplace, along with revised song pricing and official support. Until then, remember that we are looking at an American import, and there may be differences between the Zune that we’ve taken a look at and the final Australian version. These differences may affect our opinion of the localised unit.

The Hardware
The trump card Microsoft is betting on is community connectivity. Throughout the Zune’s installation process, you’ll need to choose or create a unique Windows Live and Zune ID, and are given the option to have Xbox 360’s on your network connect to and stream from the Zune.

Wi-Fi is built in, and lets you transfer songs to other Zunes within range. You have three plays or three days of use (whichever comes first) before the song is deleted. When that happens, the metadata is retained so you can hunt the file down on the Marketplace -- Microsoft’s iTunes music store equivalent -- complete with DRM technology, as expected.

Speaking of DRM, anything that you’ve already purchased from an online music retailer that’s encoded with Microsoft’s Plays For Sure DRM technology won’t play on a Zune. Plays For Sure is Microsoft’s DRM technology and player certification scheme that is in use by Napster, Rhapsody, Music Match and other retailers. We sympathize with anyone who plans on getting a Zune and has already bought legitimate, Microsoft DRM protected music for their Creative, SanDisk or other Plays For Sure-certified music player.

On the flipside, the Marketplace currently offers unlimited music downloads for US$15 per month. Stop paying and you lose the song licenses, which disables but doesn’t delete your downloads. After searching for some Aussie music and getting no results from the simple search, we put the same string into the advanced search and found something. Irritatingly, we could find information about Hilltop Hoods and cover art for The Hard Road, but it wasn’t available for download. That should change with time and regionalisation though.

The user interface is better than the iPod. Yep, we said it. It only took a few additions, such as making upper layer options accessible with the left and right arrows while still being able to scroll through the active options with the up and down arrows. For example, if you’re looking at the track list for The Bloodhound Gang’s Hooray for Boobies, pressing left or right will take you to the track lists for Pendulum’s Hold Your Colour or System of a Down’s Hypnotize respectively.

Keep pressing the back button and you’ll hit the root level, and then jump between it and whatever track is playing. There’s also an additional menu between selecting a track and playing it, where you can choose to send it to another Zune or add it to the current playlist.

The Zune has a vertically orientated, 3 inch, 320 x 240 4:3 screen. It’s not only noticeably larger than the iPod’s when turned horizontally to watch videos, but it provides more space to browse through menus and music. Pictures are also viewed in landscape and can be set as a background. Both the screen and menu layout seem clearer and more logical than the mighty iPod’s.

The circular control isn’t touch sensitive and doesn’t move; it’s just a 4 way rocker switch. We suspect that’s to prevent Steve Jobs from declaring a jihad on Microsoft. Regardless, navigating through the menus with traditional buttons was less of a chore than we expected. Like the iPod, the Zune displays the letter of the artist, album or song as you scroll through lists at pace. Unlike the iPod, however, it doesn’t jump to the top of the list, making life easier for people with big collections.

It’s solidly constructed; the utilitarian looks grow on you; it sounds great and it doesn’t get as hot as the iPod during use or sync.

It’s a good piece of hardware. But the software? It should be tried for War Crimes. Who do we have to see around here to have the Geneva Convention amended?

Read on...