Well like I mentioned last week, yesterday was meant to be a big day for portable music players, and in general there was a fair ol’ bit of news, but none of it earth shattering unfortunately. I was a bit underwhelmed by Apple’s conference if I’m honest, despite being a Zune owner (which in itself is nothing to shout about) I couldn’t help but realise that Apple seem to have begged, borrowed and stolen all their new features from elsewhere.
Firstly the Zune announcements, they were leaked earlier that morning with the pictures of the new 16gb Flash memory Zune and the 120gb
Now, storage space upgrades are all well and good, adding color options isn’t a major step though (what I like to call the Nintendo Upgrade Strategy) so I was quietly happy since there wouldn’t be a new all-singing all-dancing model for me to shirk my Zune 80 for. Phew, my wallet breathes a sigh of relief.
They did however announce several software upgrades, of which I believe they shadowed Apple’s new iTunes features (more on them later). Having the FM tuner o nthe Zune has always been a bonus and a point against the iPod, but now if you are able to get RDS data from the station you’re listening to you’ll now be able to tag the song you’re hearing for a later purchase when you are back at your computer. Pretty cool, but mybe you won’t need to connect to your computer….hmm.
Another plus point is the wireless features of the Zune, including syncing over your home network (admittedly a total battery hog if you have massive sync sessions planned)but now you can access the music store (if you’re in America, boo hoo) over wireless too! Yes, the iPod touch does that but the Zune’s direct competitor; the iPod Classic doesn’t have any such feature.
There were a number of other features of littlenote such as playlist generation and other junk (junk that Apple blew all out of proportion and warranted an entire version step up to number 8) but the fact that the next Zune version, 3, will be available for free next week. Coolio, in summary Microsoft have added more to their unique features and now should look to updating the Zune software more frequently and making it more user friendly like iTunes. Microsoft’s entertainment side seems to dislike frequent updates and I’d hope they change this.
Oh, and release the Zune in the UK already!!! It’s a great product, betters the iPod in many ways, come on Microsoft, don’t stop being a market share chewing juggernaut now! I kid, I kid.
Tune in later for my view on the Apple event!
