I am now… a Zune owner.
Right now I have an abundance of media players in my house. I have a video iPod Gen 5 (30GB HDD), an iPod nano Gen3 (8GB Flash), an iPod nano Gen1 (4GB Flash), a Zune 30, and now a Zune 80. There’s also a bunch of flash based MP3 players that are from yesteryear, ones that are grayscale music-only devices that used MMC or SD cards, but those are beneath notice…
Why so many devices?
Well, for the gym, I like to have a Flash based device: no moving parts mean that I don’t have to worry about data corruption. Why two nano’s then? The Gen1 nano was a gift: to be blunt, I plan to use that until it stops working – besides, the thinner shape of the Gen1/Gen2 nano fit in my pocket really well. The Gen3 nano? It’s handy. The 2″ screen is very usable for playing video and the device size is really nice. I know a lot of people don’t care much for the short/wider shape, but it is so thin that I think the wide format is forgivable… I plan to switch to this for gym use at some point – in the meantime, it’s mostly just “extra”.
Why not a Zune 8? Well, even though it’s using a proven form factor, the screen is smaller (1.8″ vs 2.0″) and if there’s one place I have to have Shuffle by Album, it’s the gym. In those scenarios, it’s a must have. Besides, the Zune 8 wasn’t around when the Fatty Nano came around – simply put, they just got to me first.
The rest of the devices are slated for use everywhere else: the house, the car, on a plane, even at work. The video iPod has been a good device… but it’s two years old. That means it’s time for an update. As an investigative process, I picked up a refurbished Zune 30 on the cheap, once the new software was released; I’m a huge fan of the new bits. Well. A bigger fan of 2.0 than I was of 1.0. Anyway, the Zune 30 was decent but bigger than I wanted… to be blunt, I probably could have fit my iPod in the Zune 30’s shell. I also missed the Zune Pad that I had messed around with during some early testing. I missed it a lot.
For the overall device upgrade, it came down to the new iPod classic 80GB and the new Zune 80. For the second time in the same post, I’ll be blunt: the Zune 80 kicks the holy shit out of the iPod classic. I’m told that the iPod classic 80GB is the same size as the video iPod 30GB, so when I compared sizes, I compared the Zune 80 with my old iPod. The rest of the ass kicking involves features.
The Zune 80 is about 1mm thicker, 1mm longer, and the same width as my iPod. While this would usually be a deal breaker, I considered the differences between the devices… for that 2mm difference, I get WiFi sharing, WiFi syncing, an FM tuner (that picks up track info OTA which was a nice surprise), and a 3.2″ screen. It also steps up in other areas to match the iPod feature list with native MPEG4 support, Podcast support (which is awesome with wireless syncing), and a whole bevy of accessories.
Then there’s the Z-pad versus the click wheel on the device itself. I have to say that I’m shocked to admit that I like the Z-pad more than the click wheel… I didn’t expect to, but after playing with it during the beta cycle – and spending some time with a Zune 30 – I found myself unsatisfied with both of the older devices. It was impressive enough for me to want the Zune 80 instead of just quietly upgrading to it.
Video playback has been nifty. I took an MPEG4 video that I’ve played on a PSP, an iPod, and 360 – it sync straight to the Zune: no more encoding required! And it looked good too. Nice big screen, decent back-lighting (even when set to medium), and the controls were laid out as expected, meaning that they rotated to fit landscape playback mode.
Another bonus feature is that it comes with a set of earphones that make the iPod ear bugs look like a couple of tin cans with strings. Billed as “Premium earphones” they are in ear models with three different sized inserts and have a cloth-wrapped wire, rather than plastic or rubber. Also, as was the case with Zune 30, the backs of the earphones are magnetized, so they “snap” together: a nice touch when you want to throw the whole thing in your pocket.
Overall, it was a very happy purchase and I’m hoping some stock makes its way into the retail stores. My take on it: if you have a non-DRM MP3 and MP4 collection of media files and want a player with a large drive for storage, the Zune 80 is the device that you want.
I know – no one is more surprised by this statement than me, but I’m just being honest about it – it’s just that good.
I figure it’s safe to post about this, since The Furry One isn’t around to read blogs – in spite of a balanced view of the universe, he’d be the first person to call me a “fanboy”. *g*