Instead, it's just four buttons hidden under the compass points of a plastic ring. It doesn't turn, and it's not touch-sensitive. What looks like an iPod scroll wheel, though, is a fakeout. 2.5), so movies and slide shows feel more expansive. The three-inch screen has the same 320-by-240-pixel resolution, but it's larger (3 inches vs. Battery life is the same for music playback (14 hours), slightly better for video (4 hours vs. But it's noticeably thicker (0.6 inch vs. The Zune matches the price ($250) and capacity of the 30-gigabyte iPod. It won't turn heads, but it won't get fingerprinty and scratched, either. It's coated in slightly rubberized plastic, available in white, black or brown - yes, brown. It can't touch the iPod's looks or coolness, but it's certainly more practical. So how is the Zune? It had better be pretty incredible to justify all of this hassle.Īs it turns out, the player is excellent. It's a ridiculous duplication of effort by Microsoft, and a double learning curve for you. To make matters worse, you can't use Windows Media Player to load the Zune with music you have to install a similar but less powerful Windows program just for the Zune. Microsoft's proprietary closed system abandons one potential audience: those who would have chosen an iPod competitor just to show their resentment for Apple's proprietary closed system. (Although Microsoft is shutting its own PlaysForSure music store next week, it insists that the PlaysForSure program itself will live on.) It was bad enough when there were two incompatible copy-protection standards: iTunes and PlaysForSure. Their reward for buying into Microsoft's original vision? A great big "So long, suckas!" Never mind the PlaysForSure companies who now find themselves competing with their former leader. Never mind all the poor slobs who bought big PlaysForSure music collections. Erickson will say is, "PlaysForSure works for some people, but it's not as easy as the Zune." Is Microsoft admitting, then, that PlaysForSure was a dud? All Mr. server is the point is that Microsoft blames its partners for the technical glitches.) server, and we can't control that," said Scott Erickson, a Zune product manager. "Yahoo might change the address of its D.R.M. The interaction among player, software and store was balky and complex - something of a drawback when the system is called PlaysForSure. All of them put together stole only market-share crumbs from Apple.
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