Digital Trends

Microsoft Zune 8GB November 13th, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Features and Design

The 8GB Zune seems to be based much more than coincidentally on the first and second generation iPod nano. It has the same vertical layout, very similar dimensions and identical location of dock connector, headphone jack and lock button. The Zune, however, has a vertically oriented LCD screen that allows for viewing cover art, movies and photos. The new Zunes, whether 4GB or 8GB, use flash memory instead of hard drives, making them much lighter, thinner, durable and battery-friendly. Of course, the dollar-to-gigabyte ratio is much higher with flash memory, but the benefits are well worth it to many buyers.

The new Zunes have sleek, scratch resistant plastic faces with a distinctive glossy finish. The Zune Red is really bright red, like deep red fingernail polish. There's also a pink Zune (think Pepto Bismol), a sleek black version and a queasy, pea-soup green model. The back sides of all the flash-based Zunes have a matte aluminum that makes them virtually fingerprint resistant. This matte finish is so much better than the grease, scratch and fingerprint craving silvery backsides of the iPod. Microsoft should be commended for this positive feature.

The Microsoft Zune and Apple iPod nano

The Zune has a very nice 1.8" 320x240 pixel LCD screen. It's pretty bright, though not quite as bright as the newest generation iPod nano, classic or touch. The brightness is easily adjusted in the Settings menu. The screen is just large enough to clearly display album art, contextual menus and videos. Frankly, some of the text displayed on screen is way too small, however this was not a flaw with the LCD screen, but rather with the size of font selected by Microsoft.

The Zune can play numerous music and video files and now has special support and organization for Podcasts and Videocasts. Supported formats include MP3, M3U (MP3 playlists), M4A, M4B, M4V (MPEG-4 video), MP4 (MPEG-4 video), WMA (Windows Media Audio), WMV (Windows Media Video) and ZPL (Zune playlists); AVI did not make the list. The Zune can display photos in JPG format but not PNG or GIF.

The new Zune has a touch sensitive navigation pad, like a hybrid between the iPod scroll wheel and a laptop mouse pad. Instead of using circular motions to navigate menus, adjust volume and skip between songs, you use the Zune touch pad to logically scroll up, down, left and right. You can use the pad in a touch-sensitive mode, or press down on the edges of the pad for a more tactile control. The nav pad works brilliantly, however it took a little practice to accurately press the center button for item/song selection.

The Zune comes with a built-in FM radio tuner so you can listen to your favorite radio stations. Use the Zune nav pad to scroll between available stations. The play/pause button works to silence the audio, just like it would pause/resume an MP3.

Brilliant Wireless Action
 
Microsoft gave the Zune the wonderful ability to wirelessly share songs with other Zune users. The new flash based Zune handles the wireless transfers smoothly and with very little setup. Apple should learn a lesson from Microsoft and offer a similar feature in future iPods. 

Even better than sharing songs wirelessly, the new Zune can be synced to your computer without cables. The built-in wireless radio can be quickly configured to connect to your wireless network (802.11b/g), hand-shake with your PC and update songs, photos, videos or however you configure the Zune to sync - It's fantastic.

Zune Marketplace

The Zune Marketplace is Microsoft's equivalent to Apple's iTunes online store. The Zune Marketplace requires a user account to log in and browse music. Much like the iTunes store, you can preview songs before downloading them. Particularly nice is how the Zune store will move on to play the next sample song, whereas the iTunes store stops and sits there like it's tired of helping you. Of course, the iTunes store has its benefits - much better music management features, easier login and account management, logical dollar-based music purchases (as opposed to the lame "points" system), smart playlists, movies and TV shows, etc. 

Of course, iTunes does not have any sort of monthly music subscription service, whereas Zune marketplace does. The subscription service allows users to pay a flat monthly fee for access to all the music and other content they can possibly cram onto their Zunes. It's really brilliant, and it's really baffling that Apple hasn't adopted this type of account option.

The Zune Marketplace has a great look and feel to it