I went with the Zune / have avoided apple products for years because I find their advertising smarmy. So, I went with Zune and received ENDLESS RIDICULE.
BUT! Zune was great. I had the zune app with spotify-style music subscription before spotify was a thing.
The Zune software was really pretty and nice, and you could plug your zune into your computer and it would act as an external hard drive without fighting with it.
Everyone always rallies around the Zune HD like it was unfairly treated by the market. I had one and no, it was overall not a good move by Microsoft.
The Zune HD was a decent music player, don't get me wrong. Well designed, easy to plug and play, good battery, etc. But it released at the same price point as the iPod Touch (iTouch as some called it) and looked like and was advertised as a competitor. Even had the same general design.
Yet MS did not have the foresight to make the Zune app friendly. Zune HD had app "support" (e.g. calculator app that took 5+ seconds to load, barren app store if it even had one). iPod Touch exploded (everyone in my high school got one for Christmas in 2008/2009!) because of the apps. For Apple, the music was a solved problem and not something worth talking about in length. Being able to have a music player that had Wi-Fi and could play games was a genius idea back when no one had smartphones or most people didn't want to spend the money on one. MS just felt like it was catching up and it showed all the way through the Windows Phones.
As I mentioned, both the original Zune and Zune HD lines are good devices but were hampered by MS' slow execution and lack of vision of what people wanted.
Can't comment on the actual Zune subscription service. Never used that.
The iPod Touch was basically taking an iPhone of the same vintage and cutting out the cellular modem. So a lively app ecosystem was ready to fall out of the box.
MS had nothing comparable to build the Zunes from. Windows CE/Mobile was a technically valid potential base, but it wouldn't easily convert to a sexy consumer-friendly system.
I really never understood the hate, I had the first version and it was amazing, the UI looked a lot better and futuristic than iPod’s (at least for my taste), it fell solid and well done, it had video output which replaced my dvd at the time.
A bunch of kids at my school had them I eventually got an iPod Nano cause it was an affordable option. After getting used to it I eventually convinced my parents to get me an iPod Classic. Years later I found out just how much cooler the Zune was.
I suspect that WindowsPhone 8.1, the nicest phone software ever, was descended from that design effort.
I'd very much like to see a story or an interview with the designer(s), who deserve recognition for that work. If such a piece exists, a link would be appreciated.
Right, I had a WindowsPhone 6.5 device from HTC, and it was rather meh on nice hardware. But it could boot an Android from XDA on SD card with little fuss, and that was an improvement ;-)
Now I'm just hoping the incumbents copy enough of the good design to make the loss bearable.
I never understood the love for the iPod, it was pretty mediocre. It did have iTunes integration which had the ability to purchase music and sync, but it had and still has a shitty interface.
Edit: I get that we have to worship Steve jobs, but the iPod wasn't revolutionary. Others before and after did it better.
Not sure I understand the disagreement here; I think you're right on. I had an mp3 player before the iPod came out; it's not like iPod was the first mp3 player. The iPod had a nice external "look" and great marketing, but functionally it was much more difficult to use than other mp3 players that were available at that time. I was told iTunes worked better on the mac, but my experience using it on the PC was nothing short of painful. Other mp3 players had the capability of of using simple drag-and-drop functionality to move your mp3's over to the player, without the need to learn a new program and without forcing a different idea of music library management on the user.
The only thing I can remember it having was the smart playlist feature, where you could construct playlists using criteria like "Has at least 3 stars" and "Not played in five days" etc.
Though that was more of an iTunes feature, that I wouldn't mind seeing in Spotify!
It let you make auto-updating lists to keep your library fresh, and not rely on the shuffle feature.
The market clearly values some attributes of devices differently from you. That’s fine, and it’s good that there are a variety of different decices out there to fulfill different needs. But “mediocre” or “shitty” are really not useful words in this context.
They absolutely are apt descriptions as an opinion. Clearly the iPod was wildly popular, I was questioning why and described my viewpoint of an "ok" device with plenty of competitors. That also had better interfaces.
I had a Creative Nomad before the first iPod came out, which also had about 4GB of storage.
1. The Creative Nomad had a slow-refresh screen with mushy buttons, vs a wheel on smooth ball-bearings and a quickly refreshing screen and intuitive hierarchy to navigate
2. The iPod took about a second per song to transfer music with Firewire, compared to the ridiculously slow USB on the Creative Nomad
3. The Creative Zomad was a little larger than a Discman, and fit in a very large pocket. The iPod fit into jean pockets
To be fair firewire wasn't used all be that much. It really was under deployed. Apple didn't have the clout to push back then. When you are 5-10 percent of a market for twenty years, maybe they are not the power house they are known as
The nomad was far superior to the iPod in my experience (you didn't have to use the garage iTunes software). Currently the Dell XPS line kicks the shit out of anything apple has made. A pure Android pixel surpasses an iPhone in every way possible.
Not every way possible. The pixel is a great device, but in some small areas it can't even compete with the iPhone. For example, haptics. the current iPhone has haptics so much better than anyone else it's not even funny. And on the software side, they have the ridiculously user-friendly airDrop.
Sorry to say the iPhone might still be sorta competitive, but lost the war a while ago
And yes every way possible reason, its on my list "don't recommend unless I hate the person" if I could give a yelp review, it edge out Samsumng slightly
Agreed. I still use my original Zune every day. It's off the grid now, the Zune software still works but can't connect to any MS servers, has an FM radio. They can be picked up very cheap.
I have a Zune 120 and Zune HD as well but I don't find them either as good, especially on FM radio.
I have each generation they made. I personally like the 1st gen Zune 30 since I listen to a lot of KEXP and it has the best performing radio, but I'd suggest looking at the models and figuring out what you need. None of them are bad in my opinion.
Do you have a recommendation if I just want to play MP3s through my car aux? Don't really care about size as long as it's at least 2 GB.
Every time I look for something, it seems like there's only $20 junk and $100+ players to choose from. I've gone through 3 Sansa Clips that just keep dying. I bought a Fiio x1 and had the wheel die on me in the first year, and using the warranty was way too much hassle.
Not a Zune, but consider a Blackberry 9900 - there are some on eBay for around $40 [1], they take micro SD expandable storage, appear as USB drives so they don't need sync software, have a standard headphone socket, have wifi and bluetooth and touchscreen as well as physical keyboard, and the hardware and build quality is "high end business device from ~2011".
Software is nothing special, but shuffle play artist/album/song/playlist it can do.
Agreed, this was my phone for years and the speed of opening the music app and typing to filter down to what you want is fantastic. Easily swappable battery too.
Zune 80/120 or Zune HD. You can usually find people practically giving them away on Craigslist, Offerup, etc. Zune 120 has a disk drive in it if you're concerned about that. Zune HD comes in 16GB, 32GB, and a rare 64GB and includes HD radio.
The Zune was too late. It was launched 6 months before the iPhone was announced. The MP3 player market peaked shortly after as iPhone and Android took off. It's hard to launch a new product into a shrinking market.
From the pictures a few links through, it was silkscreened on along with some other information that was going to be there anyway. I imagine if it was before that silkscreen was made, it didn't cost anything extra.
Further on this point: It's common for PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) to have Easter eggs in either the copper or silkscreen layers. They're also often in the photolithography masks used for making silicon chips: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html
Was just talking about the Zune the other day. I really with Microsoft would release a new one or a phone or something. I’d love to just have a dedicated music player when traveling so I don’t use up my phones battery.
Music playback from local storage uses a minuscule amount of battery - if you listen all day, you’re going to lose only an hour or so of standby on a modern phone.
You’d be better off spending the same money to buy a battery pack to recharge your phone when it runs low.
True and I have two huge battery banks but I still don’t like using my phone. Keeping my huge music library eats into my video and photo storage. And it’s not like Apple lets me stick a micro sd card in.
Uses, or should use? On an Android device (S5) I've found the battery usage from music playing not-insignificant - perhaps it prevents the phone from fully entering standby, or something? At a very rough estimate, I'd say it uses 20% as much power to play music as active usage requires, though this is very much anecdata.
Either way, I'll second the recommendation to get an external battery pack - a high-quality one will give more audio playback time than a media player, with much more utility and convenience.
BUT! Zune was great. I had the zune app with spotify-style music subscription before spotify was a thing.
The Zune software was really pretty and nice, and you could plug your zune into your computer and it would act as an external hard drive without fighting with it.