Its been a bash-Zune season so far with so much written about it ever since its first appearance, without anything being remotely positive about the Zune. Sometimes I felt that they were written with the sole intent of bashing up the big M and their latest offering. As I mentioned once earlier, Andy Ihnatko even proclaimed that it'll bedead and gone within six months.
But finally, someone has come up with praise review for the Zune, declaring that Zune is even better that the iPod itself. Unbelievable, it may sound, but thats what Matthew Miller at ZDNet thinks after three weeks with the Zune.
Unlike many people slamming the Zune, I have been checking out the Zune and the iPod with video in direct comparison and have to say I prefer the Zune for my usage.
In side-by-side comparison, I find the Zune with its directional pad much easier to navigate than sitting there spinning my thumb around in circles on the iPod wheel.
The Zune is taller and thicker than the iPod, but feels lighter in my hand since it isn't as dense as the iPod. [...]
While the display resolution is the same, the larger landscape display on the Zune is honestly more enjoyable for movies than the iPod and the movies don't appear grainy or poor in quality like some people have speculated without even seeing a Zune in person. I like the integrated FM radio with RDS support and find that the signal strength is actually quite decent.
Also, Matthew has put together this list of hacks for Zune that have surfaced over the Internet over the past few days. Take a look at these for a snazzier Zune experience:
The ability to playback Zune Pass content on up to 3 computers
- The ability to easily integrate podcast feeds into your Zune experience
- The ability to use the Zune as an external hard drive
- A simple method to bypass the WiFi sharing limitations
- Running Zune on Windows XP 64 bit Pro
- Running the Zune on Vista
Its really hard for me to understand the hue and cry over Zune's compatibility with Vista. The latter isn't even out yet for everyone!
Comments