Good news: Got a free MP3 player!

Bad news: It’s a Zune.

Worse: It’s a brown Zune.

Bottom line: Better than catching a disease! C+ (I’d give an iPod a B in comparison)

Read on...

The Zune has no fancy click wheel, but people did live before they were invented. Too bad the 4-way controller is a little hard to use, as the clicky spots are a little too small. This makes them them hard to use without looking—at least until you get used to them. The unit's size is reasonable and it feels very solid. There is a docking connector a la iPod, which will make the 5 people who are buying accessories happy. Good screen! Audio output quality seems on par with other good MP3 players. Write speed over USB2 is very fast, so syncing isn’t a drag.

The included earphones suck. The better earphones in the Zune travel kit accessory still suck.

The Zune software

The Zune has a tolerable GUI overall. Finding stuff to play is pretty easy (if your music was tagged well) and the bigger screen allows for easy to read fonts. Pathetic EQ options—named presets like “acoustic” and no customization possible. Basic image slide show features, and no way to put images into albums/folders. No “playlist” for videos so you have to manually start the next one. Shuffle control is global, meaning you have to go into settings and fiddle with it if you want to listen to random genre stuff and then listen to a specific album in track order. No extra features like the notes and contacts in the iPod, but who uses that anyway?

Badness: Zune cannot be used as a USB disk drive. (Well, there is a hack, but it’s a pain in the ass.)

Windows software

The Zune application lets you select directories to check for music, videos, and pictures. It grabs all the song titles, album names, etc. and stuffs that into a database. So, when you browse music in the Zune app it is actually referring to the database, not the files on disk. The Zune Marketplace is also integrated into this app, so you can buy music easily. (Is it really easy? I don’t know. I disabled the Marketplace by renaming its DLL, which speeds up the Zune app.)

The good: Building the library is pretty fast, even when the music is on a network share. Browsing, sorting, and searching your music in the Zune app is very snappy once the database is built. The app will also help you look up albums in an online database and fix up your tags. It actually writes changes to the file, not just the database, so you can clean up your collection. (Or, if you are mistrustful, keep your source files read-only and don't let Zune touch them...)

If your library is small, turn on auto-sync and it will all get copied to the Zune. If you have more than 30 GB, turn off auto-sync and drag stuff into a sync list. Syncing itself is fast. Converting video files for Zune playback is handled automatically and works well. (I dragged a QT movie into the sync list and a few minutes later it was converted and copied to the Zune.)

Bad stuff: The Zune app defaults to auto-sync so it immediately tries to stuff your Zune with any picture, playlist, video, or music that it finds. (Hit F3 to open the window where you tell it where to look for media.) No sync over Zune’s wireless is a drag. The app is a memory hog.

Really bad stuff: Installation can be problematic and the app can crash. Some people have problems getting the Zune seen by Windows. The library database can get corrupted by a crash, then it has to get rebuilt—at least this happens automatically but it’s a pain to wait through it.

Crazy stuff: It’s ridiculous that Zune support isn’t rolled into the current Windows Media Player, or that there is no "PlaysForSure" support. Left hand, meet right hand! And Zune is almost a year old, but no podcast support?

In the end

Overall, the Zune is a tolerable product for someone who is used to the Windows “Add New Hardware” dance. I'm not going to sell it to buy an iPod. Unfortunately, it fails to really advance the field in any way: it's not especially easy to use, nor stellar on the desktop, nor exciting on the hardware side. Still, for a Windows-only user who wants a better screen for their own videos, it could be a good choice. Windows users who mostly care about music should still give it a look, but iTunes + iPod would probably be better for most people.