Zune

Howdy,

So my wife and kids all chip in and buy me this “Zune” thing for my birthday. I should have been very suspicious from the start, as it’s a Microsoft product. It’s tiny, has 8 GB of memory, and has dozens of functions that may or may not be useless. It also is supposed to handle just about any format of music file, let you organize things, etc. Fine. Somewhere along the line you have to talk to this thing over a USB connection. And being Microsoft it doesn’t just show up as another drive on your computer. No, you have to download their software first. With a dialup connection it was estimating that it was going to take 8.5 HOURS to download. Forget that. I went to work where we have a T1 line, it still took 45 MINUTES TO DOWNLOAD. Are we having fun yet? OK, it finally
downloads and now I’m going to try and install. And of course it PUKES. As best as I can determine you either have to have the absolute latest updates to Windows XP or the absolute latest updates to Vista or it won’t even try to install. Is this classic Microsoft or what? They sell this product and then you have to spend MORE money on hardware or software or spend untold numbers of hours trying to pgrade your OS to get their stupid program to install. That’s called “bait and switch”, the oldest con in the world. How expensive is this thing now? Somebody explain to me why you’d want to use a product like this. It’s as “un-off the shelf” as possible. It’s engineered to be a .

I’m going to stick to my crusty old Chinese knock-off $20.00 Ebay special MP3 player. At least it works!

OK, ranting done.

Rootski

Two years ago I received a Zune and a Ipod for Christmas. Short answer here… the Zune was a pain in the butt. I could never get the music organized the way I wanted and browsing your folder structure was a frustration. The Ipod is easy to use, logical and very stable.

The Zune went back to the store and I kept the Ipod. As far as mp3 players go… there’s a reason Ipod is so dominant in that category.

Ahhh…so it’s not just me

Bought my kid a zune and it was frustrating as well. Due to the home connections speed, I took it to work and then found that our firewall prevented the last 1% of download to complete. Eventually got it figured out and it works fine without any complaints….for now.

I bought a Toshiba Gigabeat. Excellent sound quality-better than Ipod-but for some reason, it plays songs from an album in a random order. Other than that, no problems. It has a feature where you can play ALL the songs off the player in a random order. I’ve got 143 albums on it, so I never know what’s coming when I set it to play that way. If you’re a bit of an audiophile, spend some extra money on decent earbuds. I got the Etymotic ER 4s for about $80. I consider it money well spent. I don’t sell or represent these products-they just seem to fill the bill for me.

Gotta tell ya, I just got a Zune 120 gig a couple months ago, and I thought it was real easy to use and play with. I don’t believe my download took 45 minutes on DSL, either. My Zune wouldn’t work with my 8 year old Dell desktop, but it sure worked well with my new Dell laptop. Now….my laptop took a dump within 3 weeks, so now that’s the issue that I’m dealing with right now, but at least the Zune is still working.