This review will cover the Zune’s Physical interface, Games, Music videos and Pictures.
Well, about a month ago, I got myself an 80GB black Microsoft Zune, and I’ve got to say, I am impressed.
The first thing I noticed about my Zune was the high quality in-ear earphones that came with it as standard, now, with all my other MP3 players and iPods, the standard earphones were far from great, but the Zunes earphones deliver an amazing music experience.
The second thing to wow me was the touch sensitive “squircle”(square circle). What can be called Microsoft’s answer to the iPod’s wheel, the squircle is an innovative combination of touch pad and buttons, the Zune gives you the option of controlling it with the touch pad, or simple disabling the touch sensitivity and just use it as a D-pad, which I find very appealing, certain people dislike having to rotate the Apple Wheel to control the iPod and would much rather use standard up, down, left and right buttons, I personally like the wheel, its smart and makes a cool clicky noise, but i find it to be a little inaccurate, especially when gaming.
Having ended that paragraph on gaming, I’ll start this one on it. Like Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console, the Zune is equip with the ability to load and run XNA content. With XNA games studio you can learn to and build your very own games for your Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Zune, along with downloading countless games made by many up and coming game developers for free. Enabling XNA for the Zune was a very smart move on Microsoft’s part, its been available for about a month now, and already there is a great selection of home brewed games and applications available to Zune users.
Now, on to the main event, Music, the Zune’s media browser is sensational, you can scroll left to right through your genres, albums, artists, songs and playlists, and you can scroll your way down through the category your in, simple, but effective. Along with your standard music options like shuffle and repeat, the Zune allows you to add tracks to a quicklist, a playlist you can manage while on the go, its another nice little feature. The Zune supports a wide range of formats, including WMA, MP3, MP4, AAC, and M4a.
When playing videos the Zune is made to be watched on its side, so you content can be veiwed in widescreen. Video content can be sorted into catagories like movies, tv shows, music videos, ect. And of course the zune will save the last watched point of any video, so if your watching South Park while waiting for the bus, you can turn it off, and switch it back on and resume watching from where you are. As with every modern portable video player, the favorite format is MPEG-4, but as well as that, the Zune supports Windows Media Video format.
The Zune can also show your pictures and display them as slideshows. Unlike the iPod you can set custom wallpapers on the Zune, which is very appealing to me.
The next part of the review will cover Zune software, podcasts, The Zune Social, radio and other generalities.
