Upon opening i must say the best box design i’ve ever seen. Welcome To The
Social and then the player is right there. The double-shot finish looks great.
you cant tell as much on the black as you do on the brown ones but it’s still
there.

Now to the actual player

Music: transfering is great, fast as hell from the computer. and though i dont
care about album art it is nice to see it fill the screen when a track comes up
that has it. the preloaded music is great as well. the menu system is very eazy
to use and and though there is no click wheel like the ipod, you can hold down
the UP or DOWN directional buttons to fast scroll though your music. and you
can stop exactly where you want to, unlike the ipod where sometimes you might
miss because your finger moved.

Video: screen quality is amazing beats video ipods to hell. and i actually
compared one with one of my friends and he was amazed. havn’t put any movies on
it yet but the preloaded ones look great. and again the menu works great.

Pictures: not really many ways you can do something wrong with this. they work
good. slideshow is nice. i would of prefered to be able to view them in zoomed
portrat so you can see how they’d look as a background. hopfully that will come
in an update eventually.

Radio: havn’t used it much but seems to work better with the Zune headphones
than aftermarket ones.

Wi-Fi: works great. sent some pictures and a coiuple music files yesterday and
both went incredibly fast, and it works exactly like we’ve seen in the videos.

Overall: overall it’s a great player, it does need a few extra things but with
updating software and with all the things MS has said they want to do i’m sure
they’ll fix some things soon. For the money, you cant beat it. And just from
showing it around at my local mall yesterday i got 5 people asking me what it
was and i explained it to them and all 5 of them said they would go out and buy
a Zune instead of another mp3 player.

I installed the software off the zune site and didn’t use the CD to get the latest code and I worked perfectly. I already had an Xbox360 account so used that login and that imported all my person account settings. I bought one song and it used my existing points. Haven’t looked at the store too much. Will probally setup my 14 day trail after thanksgiving.

I like the interface alot. Like the way you can switch between genres, albums etc. with out going up a menu. The 30 sec fastforward in video mode is nice as is the info overlay. Being able to change your background is pretty cool too.

Haven’t tried the Wi-Fi yet, no one around to test with.

Haven’t had time to pug it into the 360 yet but the support looks pretty cool.

The radio looks nice and works better then I thougt it would. Havent used it too much.

I do miss the podcast support. I downloaded Ipodder (juice) and it works well for now. I am sure this is something they will add to software soon. (or I hope they do)

I already converted a few TV shows and one movie and they look very good.

I really haven’t had any problems yet. The album art download seems a little slow but it works well. It found most of my music fine. Seems like there are problems with the play count but maybe I am doing something wrong.

Overall: I am happy and for a new device on ver 1.1 software it is working really well. Can’t wait to see what they add in the next firmware push.

I have never owned an IPod or any other digital music player. I have never bought music from a DRM-based service… so, the Zune is a first on both fronts and I love it. Microsoft made it easy for someone who’s never done it before.

I am an IT Professional… a Microsoft Engineer… I love and hate their products at the same time, every day… and I wish more products were like the Zune. It’s a conservative first step. It’s not buggy or big on promises and shoddy on delivery… its perfect for what they said they would deliver.

It has so much potential.that I think it will be a sleeper hit that will sneak up on the market and dominate over time if it builds up to a solid IPod-killer through good solid development (and Apple shoots itself in the foot with generation-hopping). It’s not the big bang everyone was expecting a few days ago, but I think the seeds are planted in all the right spots.

This weekend I did a little electronics shopping.
I have been looking around for a new MP3 player with the capability to show images (portable digital portfolio anyone?). I already had an iPod mini (4gb) and an iPaq, but I wanted to scale down the amo…

My only gripe is the fact that I am in the military currently in Iraq and I can’t use Marketplace to get music because Microsoft does not recognize APO (Army Post Office) addresses in their account setup. They tout how much they support the military, they even made the military special Halo 3 Zune, but they don’t allow us to sign up for Marketplace. This needs to be fixed. If they claim they support us, then they need to do so.

Other than that, I love it. I have had an iPod and a Nano. Got the Zune because my iPod died, it is a Gen 1 after all. I did what I said earlier, I burned all of my music to CD. A practice anyone should do anyway, because if you lose it due to a computer or iPod failure, Apple won’t replace your purchased music.

1) I burned a CD filled with different songs from different artists, but the Zune library would not allow me to separate them out! So, I added the songs into the library one-by-one.

2) I have my own CD (bought from a store) and the album cover showed up on the library. But when I turned on my Zune expecting to see it there it wasn’t!

I don’t know it must be something I’m doing wrong or it is something the Zune is unable to do.