Living with my Zune - after 10 days
I picked up my brown Zune (which I creatively named BrownZune) on Nov 19th. 10 days later and I still love it. I play with it all the time. I'm downloading tons of videos with FeedYourZune, although I haven't yet mastered my desired playlist which leaves enough room on the device for all these movies. I've wiped the thing clean several times and loaded all new music on there. I've got play lists and AutoPlaylists I've built in the PC Zune software (this software needs a name that's different from the device's name so people can keep them separate). I've purchased a pair of songs from the market place. I've used it in the office, in the car (as a passenger), and on the MARTA trains. I've listened to the radio, watched movies, and probably played something like 70 hours of music through the thing. I've shared songs and photos wirelessly with another Zune, and I've even been forced to change headphones already from my nice expensive Sony in-ear headphones to the earbuds that came with the device on account of me losing one of the squishy rubber in-ear pieces. Now that I've got new squishy bits, I can't find the headphones!
So anyway, here's my review.
Go get one - you'll like it.
Good stuff:
- The device feels solid and well built without feeling heavy. I have no problems keeping it in my shirt pocket (although I normally don't b/c I think it looks dorky).
- The sound quality coming out of the thing is amazing. I like the little presets so I can switch between Rock, Pop, and Electronic (which are generally the types of music I'm listening to). There are 8 equalizer presets to chose from
- The picture on the display is fantastic. Videos are great, photos look incredible, and I don't know why people keep complaining about album art - what I see looks great.
- The interface is a snap to use. I used to have a portable media center with version 1 of the PMC user interface. I don't know what exactly has changed from there to version 2, but I remember not really liking version 1 and now I love version 2. Not that there isn't still room for improvement
Bad (needs work) stuff:
- I want better batteries. I feel like I'm easily getting 10 or more hours out of the thing and I'm constantly fiddling with it to change songs or watch videos. I'm not saying the battery life is any worse than what I hear about iPods. I'm just saying that I want more. Build a better battery already and give me something that I don't need to plug in for a week. Mainly b/c I want to keep the screen on all the time. The screen is beautiful, and it's part of the reason I bought the device. I want to be able to keep it on so I can see what's playing without having to click a button.
- I still think there is room in the UI for contextual navigation. I'd love that feature. I'm playing 6000 songs on shuffle and I hit one I really like. I'd like to be able to dig into that song and go find more in my Zune from the same artist or on the same album.
- Um...Left Handed people play videos too! Let me flip the device the other way. It just feels *wrong* to use my right hand to manipulate the controls
- The PC software needs work.
- Now, I'm running on a single CPU device (not even hyperthreaded) but the PC software needs some more threads in it or something. I'm frequently locking up my entire machine for a couple of seconds while the Zune software does something.
- I also take issue with the synchronization order. Now, let's say I've got 1 video playlist and 2 song playlists. 1 song playlist has 2 dozen tracks in it, the other playlist is my All Music playlist. I set up the sync order to put videos on first, then my specified songs, then my All Music. The problem is that many of my videos and a bunch of my songs require conversions. Rather than just converting and putting the songs on in the order I specified, it will convert in the background and start putting the other, no conversion required material on the Zune first. I've got 60 Gb of music. I fill the Zune up before I finish converting my videos and my selected songs. That's not right. I specifically dictated that I wanted that particular material on the device.
- Finally, and I don't know why this happens, but when I have a track and I update the track info via the metaservices.windowsmedia.com lookup service, it doesn't always replace the album art. Now, if I go to Amazon, copy and paste the album art in manually, it works just fine. It's clearly not a problem with file permissions or read-only status. This bug also afflicted me with WMP. What's the deal - you know what the art should be, just CHANGE IT.
So my final words are - go get one. We can share music and build a community. Oh wait, the correct word is "social". Go get one and we can build a social.