Someone *lovely* sent me an early Christmas present - which arrived by DHL last night - a nice 30gb Zune. I’ve long been an ipod user, having a terrible 3g Ipod which gave up the ghost when its battery died, and then a Nano, which I love to death and carry everywhere with me. I’ve also tried doing the video thing - I tried using a PSP for video, but the conversion process and lack of storage space (even with a 1gb Memory Stick) was a let down. So I was keen to try the Zune for a couple of reasons - to see whether Microsoft could match the Apple packaging and product (more on that shortly) and whether anyone could make the whole process a little more transparent.

So, unboxing the Zune is fairly similar to the Ipod, Microsoft have certainly learnt from the IPOD packaging, its simple - with nice graphics and big old slogans written across it. Everything has a little compartment and for a while I couldn’t work out where the USB sync cable was - until I opened some of the little flaps either side of the Zune player itself. The player is fairly hefty - about the size of a 1st generation Ipod, but a lot slicker looking - the design is not dissimilar to the Ipod with a ’scroll wheel’ dominating the controls (in fact this is more like a circular joystick). However, the feel is a lot better than the Ipod - the surface is a matte/textured affair (mine is chocolate brown) which feels cool to the touch and doesn’t look or feel scratchable like the Ipod. The screen takes up 60% of the front, and its a clear, bright and easy to read screen with a really clear navigation. So far the Zune is better than the Ipod - nice physical design, better screen, nice feel and excellent navigation.

I then went for the software - which installed relatively quickly on my XP desktop. It called ‘home’ for a couple of software updates, upgrading itself to V1.2 as it went. There have been plenty of comments about the photographs in the installation process, which I actually quite liked - they seem to promote a lifestyle of sharing music - which I guess is aspirational for some. The software installation took about 10 minutes with no hitches, but then the fun started. The software appears to be a ’skinned’ version of Windows Media Player, which I really like - the Zune software goes away and scans for files in a number of ’set’ locations (which you can edit later) and starts to import metadata about the music into its library. I have music on a lot of different drives - but in fact I only want a subset on my Zune, so I had to cancel the process and reset the Zune to stop scanning for a while. Then I set the library scanning to only look on one specific volume of my PC - and started the scan process again. After 10/15 minutes it finished, and I browsing my library…ugly, ugly, ugly. The software looks great - by my metadata was shafted - so I wasted an hour retagging a lot of albums to tidy up the library. I also noticed that the Zune software had set itself to be the default player - for some that may work, but I didn’t find it as flexible as WMP, so I’ve reset those associations.

Syncing music is a cinch - you drag the albums you want onto the sync pane, and away it goes…it seemed pretty quick to me - I stopped the software automatically trying to sync everything and just set it to sync what I asked for - and this worked a treat. Sound quality is great - even with the bog standard headphones…my trusted Sony Fontopias sounded excellent.

Video is a little more of a challenge - I have a whole bunch of .avi (divx) content on my PC and I wanted to get one of these converted over. A quick browse of Lifehacker led me to ‘Any Video Converter‘ which is a free many to many video converter. I installed this - its fairly small and light, and ran a divx through it whilst watching some TV - a two hour file took about 45 mins to convert, and using the same sync process as before - I dropped this into the Zune and checked playback. Perfect!

In conclusion - for v1.0 of any product, this is pretty damn good - I know the Ipod lovers will cry heresy, but the hardware is good (as a basic player/viewer) and the client software is OK - there are a number of improvements I could see. The Zune v2 is going to kill - seriously, compare the v1 Xbox against the 360 - theres really no comparison…this will be the same - Microsoft are playing the long game with this one.

Some specific improvements for me:

• Make the Zune software ‘talk’ to Live Messenger or vice-versa, so people can see what I’m playing (a favourite feature for me)
• Make the Zune software ‘talk’ to plugins - so that things like last.fm can work (a show stopper for me)
• Open the Zune marketplace up for users outside the US (I mean - duh!?!? - you may not sell in the rest of the world, but people buy them and travel)
• Make my Zune sync on wifi - it has wifi, I like wifi, I use it all the time at home, make my Zune use it
• Make the Zune software do my divx conversion or DVD ripping on the fly - whatever, just make it easy to get content onto the Zune (CORRECTION : This can be done…theres a registry hack that does this…its here)