My dirty secret... Since Microsoft released the Zune, I have coveted it - especially the brown one. I was very anxious to see and play with one. I totally fell captive to their catchy, demographically-correct ad-campaign and find their greeting, "Welcome to the Social", neat.
I had thrown in the towel on iPod's long ago and found my Zen by Creative to be cool but it definitely wasn't sexy. I do admit that I missed that part about the iPod - it was hot and had great sex appeal - but the rest of the nonsense and headache wasn't worth a one night stand let alone a relationship.
Since this was a totally unneeded, gadgety thing - Alex thought it would make a perfect Christmas gift.
So far I have been super happy. You can tell that they spent a lot of time thinking over the little things and I love that. When I plug in my computer even shows a picture of my Zune and it is brown - how smart! The UI is super slick and I think easier to use then it's counterpart. I love, love, love the quick list - it is great for long car rides. I only have a few things I would change:
1. Make my photos tall... When viewing photos, it doesn't distinguish between portrait or landscape. It is too bad really because the rectangular shape of the screen would lend well to showing portrait photos as they are intended to be seen rather than cropping the sides.
2. Quick list... I did mention how much I love this but there are a couple of things we have run into: a) It does not allow you to remove one song - you have to delete the entire list. A real bugger if something ends up in there by mistake. b) The UI on adding songs is not perfectly intuitive. Both Alex and I made the same mistake of playing a song rather than scrolling one down to "add to quick list". Not sure how to fix it but I am sure there is a way.
3. Subscription service... I think the concept makes perfect sense however, I have been having problems getting songs that I have moved over to my player to play and sync more than once. I am not sure if it is user error of if there is some sort of weird rights management thing going on. If it is the ladder than the whole thing stinks. I shouldn't have to pay a subscription only to find that I am limited in play time.
4. The Social... Another great concept with one problem - it completely suffocates your battery life. Too bad. :(
Outside of those comments - everything else has been smooth sailing. Microsoft's team gets extra bonus points for using images from Coachella as a part of their software package included with the player. Very nice!
Comments