Zune Microsoft Audio Player Review

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Price:	$ 125.50
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Rating:	5/5

12 Dec 2006

The present electronic harware and software business requires continuous expansion of services and products. Expansion very often means - death or life to a company. Companies are often bitterly jealous of the success of their rivals and try to compete in their traditional market niches.

Apple maintains a dominant share of both the music player and downloadable music businesses. It has sold more than 58 million iPods and more than a billion songs in US and the rest of the world.

Apple's iPod has swallowed ¾ of the US market of MP3 players. Moreover to that, 80% of all legal music downloads are handled via its online store. Thus, it is easy to understand why Microsoft never gives up trying to shift this market in its favour.

After many attempts to make its way on the MP3 players market, Microsoft company has finally brought forward its own Zune brand of an iPod resembling device.

Until now Microsoft mostly contented itself with its partners producing players based on the Microsoft Windows Media.

The products of the announced family line will feature similar functions, with more to add in the near future.
Zune with its 30GB of memory can store up to 7500 songs, record homemade music, instantly and wirelessly share its contents with neighbours via Wi Fi. It will feature as well an built-in FM tuner. A considerable advantage for video viewing is Zune's 3 inches display, compared to only 2,5 inches of its Apple counterpart.

While playing video it turns the image to horyzontal position to make viewing more satisfying.

A well thought touch, but it is rather unconvinient to turn the unit sideways every time for a video.

Although they say this device is able to share the songs purchased on the Zune Marketplace, you can get in trouble with some of them. An error message would appear on screen, saying "Can't receive song because of rights restrictions". This is because Zune uses a new digital rights management system (DRM).
DRM system makes sharing impossible for songs marked by record companies as "non-distributable".

One more con against Zune is that Microsoft treats its products as one-time-use items. No commitments of supporting the present Zune player have been brought forward. Thus, considering Microsoft's past accomplishments, there are high chances that the product may be shortly abandoned for other strategies not to mention the release of new software.

Zune is a good alternative to the iPod. But Microsoft needs to invest some more efforts to make its Zune a leader of MP3 players market.