With two new flash Zunes and a larger hard disk drive in the third, will Microsoft's new PMP family finally take down Apple's capo de tutti capi?
After days of leaks and speculation, Microsoft today finally announced three new Zune players. One will feature an upgraded hard disk drive, from 30GB to 80GB, and two will be flash players with four or eight gigabytes of storage. All the new players will feature a touch sensitive navigation pad, so you can finally experience navigating an MP3 player using touch. The new players can also use their Wi-Fi radio for wireless synchronization with your host computer. Otherwise, there is nothing significantly new to report.
Seriously, nothing really new. Okay, songs shared between friends no longer expire, and you can pass them along to other friends as well. Frankly, because neither we nor anybody we know actually owns a Zune, we didn't realize this was a necessary feature. To wit, it always struck us as strange that the primary feature of the Zune relies on the idea that everyone already has a Zune. Kind of a paradox, actually (or poor planning).
We could force ourselves to get excited over the h.264 support, or the improved Zune software, but we won't, because our iPods have handled h.264 since way back in the day, and we can't imagine the Zune software is now easier, friendlier or more enticing than iTunes. Honestly, these Zunes would have been unimpressive as the first generation device, but we just can't understand the hoopla over the new Zune, except for the fact that it's Microsoft, and the iPod is Apple, and there is a lot of passion on both sides of the debate (we use both Apple and Windows, we're mostly Libras).
One interesting point is that the old Zune will get a firmware update to improve the user interface, keeping it in line with the new Zune. This is something we'd like to see Apple accomplish. Frankly, we've always lamented that simple features, like alphabetical searching, couldn't be added to a last-generation iPod. Perhaps this is Microsoft's legacy approach finally trumping Apple's leave-every-user-behind style of upgrading.
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