First Look: Microsoft Zune

Oh God, The Software.

It’s built of layer upon layer of options, the core of which is Windows Media Player 11, coupled with a Microsoft managed music marketplace and a third party backend that provides detailed artist information.

Payment in the Marketplace consists of exchanging the tangible stuff in your wallet for points, which blurs the apparent cost of music and leaves you with unusable remaining points. Presumably Microsoft is throwing all the leftovers into a high interest account.

In what is almost certainly a software limitation, you can’t add WAV files to the Zune. It’s either MP3, WMV or the lossless variant of WMV.

After registering with two Microsoft driven community databases and reading the whimsically incomplete sentence on the box -- specifically “Welcome to the social” -- you still can’t plug a Zune into any computer with the freely available software and use it the way you’d like to. It will let you view the tracks on the device (and delete them), but tracks can’t be copied, despite the wireless Zune to Zune shares.

The software gives the finger to the Zune’s Wi-fi chip by selfishly demanding a cable to synch. Microsoft’s bloody ActiveSync pops up every time you start the software or plug in the Zune, but like an Alzheimer’s patient trying to remember its children’s names, it never finds the device. You can’t use the Zune as a removable hard drive either, although hackers are already on top of that one.

On average, the software eats up no less than 100MB of RAM, and occasionally as much as 200. For comparison, iTunes version 7.0.0, commonly regarded as the worst version of the software ever released, only used a hair over 70MB when we put the pedal to the metal by converting a CD, playing back an MP3, downloading a podcast and surfing the music store simultaneously.

If the software maketh the player, Microsoft’s attempt to topple the iPod will be short lived. But fortunately, all is not lost, because all the missed opportunities can potentially be fixed.

Conclusion
There are a few things that have to be said about the software. For instance…

What happened to proper wireless capability? Why ridicule the perfectly good Wi-fi chip by requiring a cable to sync? Why can’t we pay for music with that coloured, tangible stuff in our wallets? What the hell are we supposed to do with all the left over space on the drive if we can’t put data on it? Why can’t Microsoft build a capable media manager?

However, the good news is that there’s no real fault with the hardware. As a player, it’s actually very good, trumping the mighty iPod in sound quality and -- would you believe it -- interface. It’s just the excrement clinging to and surrounding the Zune that drags it down.