Behold, the almighty Zune!

It’s been close to two months since I purchased my 120 GB Zune from a Best Buy down in Naples Florida, and I figured I’d share my feelings about the whole “Zune experience” since I haven’t updated my site in forever.

First, a little background. When I started working out in November of last year, it quickly became obvious that only the coolest of the people at the gym had MP3 players prominently displayed from armbands. It’s a status thing; the nicer the MP3 player you have, the more serious you are about your physical wellbeing. Okay, so I just made that up. I really just wanted to be able to jam out to the “Numa Numa” song (otherwise known as “Dragostea Din Tei” by O-Zone) while I worked out

Now, everybody knows that anybody who’s anybody uses Apple’s iPod line for all their music listening / “I’m trend-whore” image projection needs, and like a good little sheep I decided to pick up an iPod of my own for the gym. I decided to go with the highly exalted iPod Touch model, which I felt was a nice little device despite being horribly overpriced (it wouldn’t be an Apple product if it were priced reasonably). I especially liked the web browser. It remains the best mobile browser I’ve used so far, though I’m hopeful that Sprint’s new Palm Pre will allow me to stop praising the Touch when it comes out later this year. As much as I liked the Touch’s innovative interface and browser, I have to tell you that I absolutely loathed iTunes. I’ve never liked Apple’s software (yeah, I’m talking about YOU Quicktime) but I found iTunes to be a really poor excuse for a music manager / storefront. First, it ran really slowly and had tons of lag on my humble Core 2 laptop, something I found very surprising. Second, the pricing scheme for songs is ludicrous. I know there are plenty of folks out there that feel that $.75 – $1.25 for a song is reasonable, but I humbly disagree. This is one of the biggest strengths of the Zune, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

So, after playing with the iPod Touch for all of 24 hours, I decided it wasn’t for me and returned it. Just for fun, I loaded it up with a bunch of weird photos I grabbed off of Google (firemen hosing each other off, lolcats from icanhazcheesburger, etc.). I figured that whoever they had inspect and “recondition” the unit for resale would appreciate the gesture.

After returning the iPod, I took my time and researched alternatives. Creative’s Zen seemed like a winning replacement (and was actually priced reasonably), but after a couple weeks of reading up I found the Zune. I had heard of it before but quickly dismissed it because of all the negative stuff I had read on Digg about it. That was my first mistake; Digg is notoriously populated with Apple fanboys who would rag on anything released by their savior’s nemesis Microsoft, regardless of the product’s merits. So I read about the Zune and was impressed with the relatively low price ($250 for my 120 GB model with the AV kit as opposed to $250 for the 8 GB iPod Touch that I returned). Further, the Zune Marketplace completely blows away Apple’s iTunes software in pretty much every possibly way.

Physically, the Zune isn’t much to look at. Mine is all black and about the same size as the Touch (close to the size of a deck of cards), although the Zune a bit thicker. The screen is big and beautiful, though it’s smaller than the Touch and doesn’t utilize a touchscreen. Instead of directly touching the Zune’s screen to navigate, there is a touchpad and two buttons below the screen. It may not be as elegant of a system as the iPod, but it gets the job done and doesn’t leave fingerprints all over the place. I dig it.

A major difference between the Zune and the iPod Touch is their choice of storage media. The Touch utilizes solid state flash memory as opposed to the Zune’s rotating hard drive (smaller versions of the Zune are available with flash memory). Some could argue that this gives the Touch an advantage because it can be tossed around without harming data, but I think it’s a wash. Flash may be bulletproof media but you won’t find a 120 GB flash-based iPod any time soon because it’d be far too expensive to manufacture. Further, the hard drive in the Zune seems pretty resiliant if you ask me. My buddy Dustin has dropped his 120 GB Zune several times at the gym, yet it’s never shown any signs of data corruption or anything like that. [For the record, I've been much more careful with my Zune, even before I got the protective neoprene armband for it!]

Both the Zune and Touch feature built-in WiFi radios, but the Zune allows you to download music from the Marketplace wirelessly and is capable of wireless syncing. I don’t believe you can do either with the iPod. The Zune also has an FM receiver, which I believe the Touch lacks (I’m too lazy to research that though, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). I haven’t listened to FM radio in years, so that’s a largely pointless feature for me.

The 120 GB is a great MP3 player in and of itself, but where Zune really shines is the Zune software and Marketplace. I fricken love both. First, the software is fast, responsive, and is visually superior to iTunes. To be honest, it doesn’t look reminiscient of Microsoft’s traditional color themes and layouts at all. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d never guess that it has any relation to Microsoft. There are no visual clues that would tip you off, unlike many of their other products. So the software is fast and looks pretty. That’s all well and good, but as I mentioned earlier, Marketplace is the true crown of the Zune experience. For only $15 a month, Marketplace lets you download as much music from their vast libraries as you want and share it amongst up to three of your computers and three of your Zunes. That means that for $15 a month, you and the rest of your family can potentially consume all the music you want. While it’s true that everything you download is protected with DRM (and therefore not able to be arbitrarily copied), a Marketplace subscription gets you 10 free song downloads a month which are NOT protected by DRM. If you wanted to download 10 songs to keep from iTunes, it would cost you around $10 (give or take). Should you find something you want to download without DRM but you’ve already used up your 10 free downloads, you can still purchase music for prices that are comparable to iTunes… but you already know how I feel about that. The Marketplace also has hundreds of free podcasts, and thousands of movies and TV shows available for download. I haven’t downloaded any video yet because it’s not included in the subscription price, but I’ve browsed through the categories and they have some pretty slick stuff available like Battlestar Galactica and The Office, just to name a couple.

So there you have it; my thoughts on Microsoft’s excellent Zune player and Marketplace service. It may not have all the bells and whistles of the Touch, but without a doubt, the Zune is one of the best investments I’ve made in a long time — certainly much better than the time that I sent all that money to the deposed ruler of Nigeria after he promised to make me a millionaire overnight. If you’re shopping around for an MP3 player and music download service, have a look at Zune. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Oh, and don’t send money to Nigeria.

Read more about Zune at Wikipedia: CLICK HERE