Zune - New and Old
The new Zunes from Microsoft are out (as of yesterday). They're a little cleaner and shinier than the first generation ones. They have a bunch of new features and there's a new version of the Zune marketplace and software, too.
I recently ordered a 1st gen. zune and according to the FedEx site, it's at my house right now, so I'll be playing with it tonight. It's one of the infamous brown ones. I ordered it because apparently the brown ones didn't sell very well and I bought it for about $90 (for the 30 GB model). The other ones were still closer to $200. You can get the new 80 GB ones for $250 (but they don't have brown ones anymore). However, as I write this, Amazon is currently out of stock.
Probably the coolest part of the new hardware is the new touchpad. You can use it as a regular touch pad and press the different parts to navigate. But it's also touch-sensitive and you can flick your finger across it to scroll through your songs (or whatever media you're browsing at the time).
The Zune marketplace (the equivalent of the iTunes store for iPods) has been completely re-written. The zune software was originally based on Windows Media Player. The new version doesn't seem as mature. There are a lot of things that you should be able to customize, but can't (at least not yet -- I'm sure Microsoft will be making a ton of updates to this over the next several months). The software now has built in support for podcasts, too. What's Up with Tech isn't listed yet, but should be soon. The user interface of the zune site (zune.net) and of the zune software/marketplace/whatever isn't as intuitive as it could be. One of my main complaints is that they break some primary rules of usability. They try to be cute with their naming conventions instead of naming the links what they actually are so that people can figure out where they should click. They should read Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think". Another complaint is that I can't edit all the values of the ID3 tags for my MP3's. For example, you can't specify the mood for the song. I use that a lot when choosing songs for a party, etc. I'll still probably keep using MusicMatch for that reason. Also, instead of having 10 or even 5 gradations for "preference" for you songs, all you can do is say that you like it or not (yes or no), represented by a full heart icon or a broken heart shaped icon (the previous version of the zune software let you specify the number of stars (1-5)).
I had some flaky performance on my computer with the new zune software, too. Every once in a while, like when switching between certain programs (I had Photoshop running) the zune software would all of a sudden pop to the front and/or it would flicker a lot. I'm sure most of these issues will get worked out by Microsoft very quickly (especially the bugs as opposed to the missing features).
One cool part of the new software is the now playing screen (the image below). However, I still wish there were more features. For example, whenever I see the now playing screen, I want to click on the album art to get more information (you can't). Or I wish I could see the album art bigger (throughout the app), but not possible. By looking at the image you get a feel for the music in my collection.
Another good thing about the new software-based features is that they're supposed to be backward portable to the 1st gen devices (which is a big part of why I bought one of the old ones, knowing that the new ones were coming out). I'll let you know how it goes.
