Me and My Zune
OK, the job I do allows me to play with things that are new and supposedly great, some times i’m blown away & of course sometimes i’m left with that sour taste in my mouth.
Seeing as Microsoft had released a new uber gadget I thought “why not grab one” so I did just that, below I will give an account of my experience with Zune 1.0
People talk about the out of box experience, well this was a difficult one for me as for once Microsoft have packaged a product in such a groovy way that you almost don’t want to open the box, after 15 mins of pullingmy best Dr Evil “i love you” & “you complete me” faces at the packaging and the lack of bulleted system requirements, glorifying star shaped callouts and gratutuous people shots I could resist no more.
Opening the packaging by slipping off the outer you are greated with a message “Welcom to the social”, we cheers to that ! - always nice to be welcomed to something.
The device itself sat there eyeing me up in all is uber retro cool brown glory, the first thing noticed was the sheer size of the screen, my bro who has an ipod video was equally blown away with the screen size, so after a little waving it around chanting “i’ve got a zune, i’ve got a zune” i thought i should get it going, this is where I had my only moment of fustration, Mark (the chap that grabbed the Zune for me form the US) said, before you do anyting make sure you upgrade to the new client softweare off corp net… well me being a smart arse tried to do that with a non corprate connected laptop and whilst I managed to get the software installed I couldn’t get the device to sync or update the firmware to 1.2
A little investigation and the resolution was to walk all of 20 meters to Paul’s desk and connect my device to his corporatly connect Zune’d up PC… 15 seconds later i was in FW1.2 land 
Initial playing with the device consisted of syncing up a load of music, the Halo 3 video and a few other “interesting” pictures. all were increadibly easy and fast… and by fast I mean less that 5 seconds per song/photo and the 60 second halo 3 video took at most 30 seconds to sync accross.
As anyone would do you need to explore and so thats what I set about doing, I have tried and tested everything, the devices ability to send pictures and music via the built in WiFi is amazing, we have sat here for ages just send singlo, multiple and even folders of pictures around the devices that are scattered over the office.
The built in FM radio tuner is another great function, I tend to drift off occasionaly into radio land whilst working (to avoid the uber loud typing of one person who sits near me and used to work for Nike), in attempting to compare the FM performace with either my Ipod or my Toshiba gigabeat S I found myself questioning why for so long had I put up with that pingy fuzzy radio sound I though was the norm, The Zune’s radio was a class and a 1/2 above either of my other current devices.
Another little “find” was the ability to use the Zune software and my Microsoft Points to purchase music from the zune marketplace, this single handedly saved my reputation, why?, well I just couldn’t bring myself to go to a cd store and buy the Weird Al Yank… CD, but hey a few MS Points and your away laughing.
Battery life… can’t really comment on the life of the battery as the device is still very young and I prefer to wait for a few charges and discharges till the battery warms into it’s task.
As I write this I hear talk of and read tid bits about Apple’s iTune store finally being available here in New Zealand and can’t help but think aloud (and that’s very LOUDLY) well you can do it now when I don’t give a toss, if only you had done it years ago when the rest of the world got it… but hey i’m not the only one around here who is music mad and Zune happy and i’m sure I will hear of others who will join the social.