I just bought a Zune
Early adopter here, reporting on my Zune purchase. I've been debating an MP3 player for a while. I mean, I've actually got several portable music devices, but nothing with the right form factor and capacity I wanted. I have a tiny little 128 Mb player the size of a Zippo lighter that I can fit about 50 songs on (compressed to 64 kbps). I've got a PSP with a 2 Gb MemoryStick that can probably hold about 500 songs, but it's so big that it doesn't fit in my pocket. I used to have a 20 Gb Portable Media Center, but it was a first generation model and was also too bulky, despite it's ability to hold 5000 songs.
So I decided to bite the bullet and go get a real MP3 player. I picked the brown color for two reasons. First, it's likely to be far less common than white and black devices, which might help me raise my "coolness quotient" a little. Secondly, I like the brown color. It looks adult. It looks like something I could carry while wearing a tie in an office, if necessary (not that I frequently wear ties).
Anyway - I ran out Sunday afternoon and picked one up after arguing with Best Buy's customer support for 20 minutes on the phone. So get this, my brother mailed me a $200 gift certificate to Best Buy for my birthday a few months ago and I was saving it for just such an occasion. Anyway, I knew that I'd received the card but I couldn't find it anymore. So I called Best Buy up and asked them if they could reissue it. They said my brother needed to call it in, but they could see the transaction and it would be easy to do over the phone. He called in and they told him that it didn't show in their system as ever having been delivered (since August) and because of that, they couldn't mark it as lost. So I did a 3 way call with BB customer support and my brother on the phone. We got a 3rd customer service agent who couldn't do any single task without checking for approval or asking for help. After he came back from putting us on hold for the fourth time, the connection was messed up and he couldn't hear us talking anymore. Frustrated I just told my brother to cancel the transaction and to contest the charge with his credit card. Then I went out and bought the thing from Best Buy anyway because I knew they had one in stock and I didn't feel like driving around.
The packaging was excellent - the best consumer product packaging I've ever personally experienced. This includes the PSP, a laptop or two, a pair of Xbox 360s, PCs, and thousands of other random electronic gadgets and components. I've never seen what Apple does for the iPod, but I can't imagine anyone feeling like they're unwrapping anything but a top notch product. Having said that, I can't really see why anyone would care about the box it comes in. For my money, I'd rather get a good product than a good cardboard box.
Following the directions, I installed the software first. I'd been prewarned about crashing installations by several websites, but I didn't experience a single problem. It did seem to take bloody forever to install, but haveing installed products like Visual Studio, I knew that it hadn't crashed, it was just working without reporting progress. That should be fixed, even putting a simple spinner on the screen to indicate "working" would be an improvment. I keep all my music files on an external HDD (which I won't have to carry around anymore) so it didn't find anything to synch with at first. I plugged in the USB and let the thing charge for a couple of hours before playing with it. While the Zune was charging I attached the external drive with all my music and added it all to the Zune PC software. I then built a sync list of songs I wanted on the device. I kicked off the sync and went to bed (it was late). The next morning I found that my desired list of songs had been ignored (or superceeded). There is apparently an "All Music" playlist which tried to copy all my music to the device. I have too many songs and it failed to get all of them, but I can't figure out the order. It's not exactly alphabetical by artist b/c some songs from a 'Z' artist got on there but I'm missing a bunch of 'U' artist songs. Similar story with sorting by album title and when sorting by song title. No idea. It just picked 6000 or so songs and moved them onto the device for me.
The device itself is awesome. The MP3s sound excellent, the radio feature is a little fuzzy but that seems to always be the case when I try to listen to the radio in an office building. The screen resolution for the pictures and video is crystal clear. I've been highly impressed and so has everyone who's seen it.
Quick reference to the physical size of the device:
Blackberry - weight = 4.2 oz, 4.69in x 2.28in x 0.75in (h x w x d)
Zune - weight = 5.6 oz, 4.4in x 2.4in x 0.6in (h x w x d)
Wishlist for future improvements:
- Left handed use! Give me an option somewhere to hold the device in my left hand and rotate the screen the opposite direction when viewing movies and photos. My most comfortable position is to hold the movie upside down!
- Contextual lists while playing songs: If I'm on shuffle or in a playlist of diverse artists and I like a particular song, let me click and find more songs by that artist, on that album, or in that genre.
- Flag songs for removal from the Zune during next sync. I've got a ton of music on the thing and not all of it is good. Let me build up a kill list while listening so I can free up space automatically
- Ratings while listening to music. If I've got a track I like but I'm not interested in adding it to my quick list or in buying it, I should be able to mark it as preferred (or 5 star or whatever) so I can build my own playlists later in the PC Software
- I also with it was a little faster when I plug it into my Xbox 360. I like the concept and the integration (although I don't think the Xbox 360 team is done refining the menu system yet) but the speed isn't great.