Zune Review
Feb 7th, 2007 by darryl
Before I went to Germany, I purchased a Microsoft Zune for the long flight overseas to keep myself amused. I’ve been using it now for 3 weeks, and here are my thoughts on it.
The Good
- Easy to use software. The software was pretty easy to setup and use. The only thing I needed to fix was the automatic sync. Out of the box, it attempts to sync everything to the player, which can eat up a lot of room quickly. Also, much like media player, it organizes in a tree structure, which I find much easier than the i-tunes method of displaying all songs in a huge list.
- Excellent video display. The display is nice and crisp and is a decent size for the size of the device.
- Navigation. Navigation seems pretty easy to use. I have found that navigation on the i-pod nano is a bit cumbersome (not easy to go back, and the click wheel drives me nuts.
- Playback controls. Much like Media center, when watching video, it features a 30 skip feature for skipping ahead (handy when watching tv synced to the device) and a 6 second skip back feature.
- Music playback. I have not noticed any music playback issues from the device. It works well.
- Video playback. The device plays back video quite well. I have had some video conversion issues, but that is mainly ripping and conversion software issues that I need to sort out.
The Bad
- Battery life. So far, it seems that the battery does not last very long, playing video is about 3 to 3.5 hours. Playing music is about 8- 10 hours. I have cut the quality of the files to try to get more battery life, so I will update this when I have tried this out. Update: I found out if you turn off the equalizer, it extends the battery life by a couple hours.
- Lack of DVR-MS / MPEG-2 support. At the moment, any recorded tv shows from media center need to be converted to a supported format (WMV) before they can be added to the device. I have been using DVRMS Toolbox to convert files with limited success.
The Untested
- Zune market place. Since I reside in Canada, it is not available to me. However, I’m not sure I would buy music from the marketplace, since I am not a fan of DRM’d music.
- Zune to Zune music transfer. I have turned off the wi-fi radio on my zune, because there are not any zune’s nearby.
- Pictures. I haven’t tried to sync any pictures to the Zune. I share all my pictures on Flickr, and if anyone wants to see them, a computer with a web browser will do a much better job.
does it have something like an address book like an ipod which i can use with my zyb.com account?
Unfortunately, there is not an address book at the moment, but it would be a useful addition.
Interesting to see a non mac zealot’s take on it. The Creative Zen Vision M I have is similar with smaller screen and slightly better battery life, probably due only to screen size. I’m finding that I convert everything regardless to optimize for the screen. It comes with a really nice tool that converts from dvr-ms too.
Brown zunes are silly.