Comments on: What's up in Zune-land?

Joe Belfiore's move to VP of the Zune group might indicate that the company is thinking about adding more video content to the Zune Marketplace.

[Unknown2You]

I love the Zune 2.0! It's a great device.

[cnetcensorssuck]

You and the 3 others that bought one. ;-)

[cnetcensorssuck]

[markdoiron]

Sure, there aren't a ton of Zune sales. But, my son and I each have one. The auto-synch by wi-fi is really a thing of beauty. We keep three PCs and two Zunes easily synched with music--it just magically happens. It makes a wonderful audio source in the docking station. Sure, it doesn't have iPod's neat feature of control through my home audio system--but I don't really miss that. My style of music listening is to turn it on and let it play. Who needs to be able to select songs through my home amp: The Zune remote works fine for that purpose, anyway. I also like the music by subscription. I can't imagine having to pay for each song. And, I can still rip the songs I really want to use off of Zune Marketplace (say in a home DVD production). My only gritch would be the lack of many titles. But, I suspect that's mostly because I listen to pretty obscure artists (No RIAA!!!). --mark d.

[mcphenom]

you can get it to work with most home audio by getting a cheap 5 dollar ipod av cable andplugging it into the back of your home audio or any other AUX port so you can input music direct from the zune

or if you have a zune 80 you can have flawless quality slideshows and video with the zune 80's tv out function.

[zgreenwell]

I don't see why they can't integrate the zune market place and the xbox live marketplace. Anyone who has a live account can use it to log on to Zune and vice-versa. The MS points you have carry between them too. It only makes sense to further integrate these two service. I would personally like to see Xbox Live Arcade games on the Zune. Pac Man Championship edition anyone?

[make_or_break]

The Zune 80 is, for the most part, a GREAT device. I find it much more appealing to use than its direct iPod competition, but alas I know this is a minority opinion since most of the Apple fanbase don't care for anything other than what Cupertino 'wheels' out each year. However, the big letdown with the Zune has been its client software. Zune 1.x was far from perfect, but at least its later iterations actually worked with a reasonable level of dependability. 2.x has been a severe irritation to an otherwise stellar MP3 player.

[wellseasoned]

I couldn't agree more about the software. I have the original Zune 30 gig, which lacks in a few of the features of the 80 gig, but i think to be an otherwise quality device. I'm still very satisfied with it. But interacting with this new software iteration is more or less terrible. it has created duplicate copies of songs within the software, mixing up the song data occasionally along with it. It had messed up my entire collection at the beginning of the software switchover, which i had to go in and fix. And its most egregious offense is the fact that editing songs' data is basically impossible within the software, and can only be done regarding a few simple parts of the song. I have to use an outside program to fully be able to change and arrange songs the way i want them. Microsoft, when your Zune software makes me yearn for iTunes, I think there may be a problem. As excited as I would be for video and games on the Zune software, I think the Zune Team should fix what is already out before moving on to the next big step.

[delf76]

i've always wondered why zune market place and the xbox live marketplace isn't integrated as well. it just doesn't make any sense why they don't do this....

[timtay0102]

Don't wonder. That's because unlike Apple, the culture of full software integration hasn't taken hold in Microsoft for a long while. That's the main reason on why while Zune is a good product by itself, the software integration for downloads and for similar microsoft products vis-a-vis is not really there.

This is unlike the iPod which is seamlessly connected to iTunes, and even more so to Leopard OS X.

In the end, cobbling a bunch of people from here and there means that there will be many jigsaw pieces that will not fit. I still wonder why MS hasn't recognized that such a messy approach only makes their products after all these years. No wonder most MS products have some form of BSOD.

[nothankscnet]

Thats because Apple got popular again because of the iPod, so they made their OS and Apps fit the iPod. Since Windows was already developed and popular, it makes it harder to integrate a device into it.

[Sheepish12]

Sir, please remember the Nokia NGage and countless other current devices like the Blackberry (ever typed an email on one?) and even the iPhone (the phone feature is awkward). Combining features like telephony, cameras, and gaming on one device or even on the same operating system rarely has a good result. For the most part it seems these devices become either grossly inadequate in all their features, or at least lacking in some. This is the reason that you don't run a server on Windows XP Home Edition or you don't run Windows XP on your cell phone. It's all too easy to envision a web browsing cell phone camcorder as the new wave in technology, but because of the limitations of portable devices (battery life, size, processing power, storage, etc.) most of the time combining things ends in disaster.