Okay, 1 month after I order the Zune from Buy.com, I FINALLY received the player. It's a sleek little monster and I'm sure there are plenty of sites out there that will champion why it's a good player. I like most of what it brings but here are the things that would make me NOT want to use it (I will go back to my 4GB Samsung player in the near future) and it's due to purely software (should I be suprised or not suprised considering it's an Microsoft product). If there are any first party patches or updates (i.e. not hacks but rather sponsored by the company) that can solve these problems, please let me know. 1) It's not compatible with windows media player. All my current playlist/songs are going through the WMP, but for the Zune, I'll have to use the Zune software. It's not freaking plug and play. As some one with over thousands of songs, I'll have to reconfigure my playlist, re-organized the songs and etc. This will take me way too long (we're talking 1 - 2 days) and that just makes me not want to use the player. 2) It's unable to read Chinese characters. Half of my music library's Chinese, they're are now rendered useless (I wont know how to navigate through the player to get a song I want) 3) There's also no drag and drop How hard is it to make a player with a UI that can work like a basic OS, I'm talking very basic being able to go to different folders and open files.
did u update the firmware? i think its sweet. i can get my nba podcasts, wirelessly sync, connect with my xbox and listen to the radio.
Or what about Microsoft already coming out with Zune 2 within the same year that the first one came out.
Oh how music players have evolved. Remember the days when you used to walk around the streets carrying a huge boom box..? I remember when I was a kid I used to carry my cassette walkman around like I owned the word "fresh". I've never owned anything else since then. If you get an ipod, do you need a mac ibook to operate it and put music? I don't think I'm gonna be getting zune if you need to install a silly software. I'll get one of those when all you gotta do is plug it in and drag/drop.
Retail hordes go loony over Zune Black Friday customers rush Toys 'R' Us flagship store in New York for Wii, Guitar Hero. 'The Zunes are done!' yells one. By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writer November 23 2007: 9:27 AM EST NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- It was only half an hour into Black Friday, and a customer at the Toys 'R' Us flagship store in Manhattan's Times Square was already yelling, "The Zunes are done!" Such words were likely to inspire panic on the day after Thanksgiving. The customer was referring to Microsoft's (Charts, Fortune 500) answer to Apple's (Charts, Fortune 500) iPod, an MP3 player with a 30-gigabyte hard drive, that was going for 60 percent off at $79.99. "I'm getting knocked down!" yelled another shopper, just one among hundreds who queued up in the store's video game section. Manuel Juerreo of Bronx, N.Y., had joined the line at midnight, a good five hours before the doors opened. Juerreo was waiting for a Zune, and there were hundreds just like him, lingering at the gates of this retail mecca. For the Zune customers further back in line, the gates should have read, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." "My feet are numb," complained Lucy Bell of Chicago, who was visiting New York for Thanksgiving. Bell wasn't as picky as some of the others. After waiting in lines for hours, Bell said she was at Toys 'R' Us to buy, "Anything that's left." At 5 a.m., when the neon-lit, multi-tiered store parted its gates for the consumer hordes, many of them rushed straight for the video game section. Consumers dashed down the escalators, whooping and hollering like the giddy shopping-mall looters from George Romero's "Dawn Of the Dead." "Nah, nah, chill y'all," a store employee implored to a line of hundreds of customers filing into the video game section, while a song from the Broadway hit "Annie" wailed from the intercom. "It definitely was very hectic in the beginning, due to the Zune being on sale," said Gianni Incontro, an employee based in the corporate headquarters in Wayne, N.J., who was helping out at the Times Square location. Many of the customers were also buying up Nintendo's Wii, a hugely popular video game console that was a big hit among holiday shoppers last year. "Where can I get the Wii games at?" yelled one frenzied customer to no one in particular, as he dashed through the store. "Wii!" yelled a woman into her cell phone, as she walked past a wall of Xbox remotes. Nearly half an hour after the doors opened, the Wii supply was still holding out. "We got three walls of Wiis," reported store employee Jose Vargas. He said the consoles had sold out a few days ago but were re-supplied in time for Black Friday. Meanwhile, a six-foot stack of Extra Special Elmos had dwindled to a height of two or three boxes, despite the fact that this year's edition is only slightly different from the 2006 model. The lack of innovative new products was not lost on consumers. "The Wii was last year!" yelled a consumer with a plush Spiderman in her hand. She stood in a line that snaked, anaconda-like, through the video game section. Donna Lopito from Smithtown, N.Y., who braved the Black Friday crowds with her brother-in-law Kevin Nugent, said the store was only selling one Wii per customer. "We couldn't get them anywhere else," said Lopito as she headed for the exit, a Wii under one arm and a Guitar Hero video game under the other. If she had the choice, said Lopito, she would have imported the entire Wii stock en masse to Long Island. It would have beat standing in line. "People were a little nasty," said Lopito, referring to the mad hordes. To top of page Black Friday shopper surge Find this article at: http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/23/news/companies/toysrus/index.htm?postversion=2007112309
Version 2.2. Up to date. Still no - Drag and drop, importing WMP playlist, or Chinese/Korean/Japanese language option. As a mp3 player, it's basically taking on a role of a very large IPOD shuffle to me... sigh.
If the Zune was 80 bucks all along I(along with a lot of other people) would buy it too, but it isn't.
i got both, IPOD and the Zune ($85 on Woot) I've been very impressed with Zune. the software is not bad at all, some of the features are cooler than the IPOD. also, Zune finds more Album covers than Itunes.
Sandisk players are drag and drop + have asian language support. I have a old e260 and although it's too big for my taste, it is cheap and easy to use.
I actually went through 2 Sansa in one day (the OS kept freezing up on me). I did like that player a lot (interface and everything), except for the freezing up on me part which forced me to return it. That was quite early on so the new firmwares might've fixed it. Samsung players are pretty good for what I wanted but I was looking to upgrade.
I use Rockbox on a Sansa e250. It has Asian language support once you switch to unicode font. I wonder if it's Zune compatable. I'd definitely look into it. More file support and cool games to play with.
Reminds me of my Sony "MP3" player I bought a while back -- I didn't realize I would have to use their crappy Atrac music format to play music. Having to add another player to my computer (think iTunes, but much worse) and then reformat all my music to play in the walkman was a nightmare. Then it stopped playing music I downloaded from sites it didn't like -- I think Sony had it in their minds that people would just start DL'ing from their site alone.
Check out Meizu M6. Sweet small mp3/video player that is no bigger than a credit card and probably 1/2 inch thick. The video screen is as big as the ipod video screen. They constantly release updates to firmware and actually make significant changes. You can also skin your player however you want to. And finally, the sound is probably some of the best I have heard out of any portable digital player. Meizu M6 Review And it's a pretty damn good deal if you ask me. I got my 4gig for 85 bucks over at newegg.com. They have released the M6 SL which is slimmer, but I'm totally fine with the original M6
you can drag and drop folders from My Computer into the the zune software and it'll will add everything in the folder
i bought a 30 gig zune for $100.00. obviously the older version. its brown but i found some covers online my question is...is it worth it? or should i just cough up the 50 buck and get a 4 gig ipod? im really undecided in this matter
How can you compare a 30 GB hard drive player to a 4 GB hard drive player? To me its like comparing a bicycle and a car as effective transportation to get to work 20 miles away.
This brings me to an interesting question. Why the hell is there not a player with replaceable hard drives? I mean, why can't sameone make a player that can simply read the small drives, like a digital camera, and you can just buy standard players and just replace the drives to get whatever size you want? Mp3 players are currently like walkmans or cd players that come with the tape or cd already installed, so you have to buy the biggest one possible to really enjoy it, and another inexpensive small one to go jogging with. That's just stupid to me.
