REVIEW: Zune 2.0 - the best player on the market!

31 Responses for "REVIEW: Zune 2.0 - the best player on the market!"

1. edge0 January 11th, 2008 at 10:55 am 1

   Great news…another happy customer…I like the statements…

   "With the new software and the changes to the firmware that was made to the Zune player along with the client software upgrade - the Zune player is the best player on the market! It is better than IPOD and any of the other players out there."

   The movement continues!!

2. kaseyart January 11th, 2008 at 11:24 am 2

   muahahahaha, I had to read that twice just to make sure I read it correctly. That is awesome. Glad to see the Zune getting it’s props!

3. FatalFlaw January 11th, 2008 at 11:43 am 3

   I’m glad that more and more people are liking the Zune. It’s good to see that more and more people are recognizing it for what it is.

   I didn’t particularly enjoy the review, it wasn’t written very well and wasn’t very informative, but any positive publicity for the Zune is a good thing.

4. azaas January 11th, 2008 at 12:07 pm 4

   "Zune 2.0 the best player on the market"…..not quite there.I know that i may upset a lot of people,and given the fact that i’m writing this on gotzune.com it won’t be weird to get all kinds of bashing.But before you go ahead and start throwing all those "Zune ownz","You’re just an Apple fanboy" [See my account first and then u’ll see why i’m not] take a minute and read my post.
   Software updates : OMG!!!Simply put epic fail.As if it wasn’t enough that they take for ever to install,i seem unable to tell for sure wich settings they’ve messed up with and sometimes reset them to default.The thing changed my disk rip settings the other day….
   Liscense issues : Zune won’t accept the liscense on some of my legally riped tracks [cd to pc] and the funny part is that they were accepted at my old zune…[no comments on that one.it is really lame but it can be easily fixed]
   It still can’t be synced to my other music subscriptions wich i’ve already paid so i got to get the zune subscription which costs more money
   Size:Still considerably big,failing to deliver such an outstanding video quality that would justify its size.I really think that videos look much better on ipods,but maybe that’s just me.
   But the biggest disapointement for me is that once again microsoft fails to do the big step into the future.Microsoft people are working on desktop pcs with touch technology and in the same time they fail to do such thing when it comes to their flagship product,when it comes to portable devices.Iphone’s ipod experience was mindblowing.I haven’t seen such a revolutionary product in years and shrinking zune a bit and giving it wireless syncing is not the answer i was expecting from microsoft.
   A previews comment said that the "movement continues"…think not.People having seen what ipod touch and iphone look like i don’t think that they will choose Zune over them just cause it has radio!!!
   Now let me make it clear.I am not writing this in order to bash microsoft.I’ve been a ms user for more than a decade and i was in love with them [maybe i still am but vista still hurt me inside :P].I just want to see microsoft doing what they’re meant and capable for.I want not only to get better hardware but better software as well.
   Anyway,once again,that was just my opinion.No need to agree with me.I’m really looking forward to your thoughts….stupid and idiotic posts will not even be considered to be given an answer or debate with the writer.

   Thx and take care

5. edge0 January 11th, 2008 at 12:40 pm 5

   Good comment…everyone is entitled to their opinion, so I’m not sure why anyone would bash your comment. The ipod touch is a great piece of technology, but i feel the ipod classic is still more popular than the touch (because of the memory). But I’m sure the ipod touch will just keep getting better, and could possibly be the staple of the ipod world in due time.
   By the movement continues, I only meant that there are more people who have come to realize that the new zune is a big step in the right direction. Considering where they started, I believe, they needed to at least get their foot in the door, since it is obvious they cannot kick it down.  With how strong the Ipod is, I don’t believe we will just wake up one morning and find the Zune on par, but it’s possible that there will be a gradual movement in that direction. But hey, that’s just me. I could be wrong. I have been before, and I’m sure it won’t be my last time..haha..

6. azaas January 11th, 2008 at 12:55 pm 6

   @edge0 : I’d have to agree with ever thing you said.But i got this little side note i feel i must share with all of you.Even though it’s true that most people seem to go for the ipod classic,imo,this is the worst thing to do.In general hard drive based players is not the rout you’d want to take anymore.Flashed based players are the future and you’ll might as well take that path from now,or you’ll end up with a 350$ device that is not only outdated [not a fashion geek or anything like that] but also has lots and lots of hardware issues.Games previously purchased for the ipod [little bro’s request] will simply not work on my ipod classic and it’s completely a hardware issue.I now have to go and purchase those games again!!!
   Furthermore,the cable which used to connect my ipod to my tv will not work with the ipod classic.I think you can guess if this is a hardware of a software issue [if you can’t hardware is the answer hehe].
   Flash based players given the fact that depend more on firmware to be managed,have the benefit to be able to fix and improve a lot of things,such as compatibility issues and many many other things [through a firmware update i managed to fix the screen quality on my ipod touch!!!].Won’t be long before a flash based player with 160 gigs hits the market [maybe even next year or sooner] so i wouldn’t spend money on the classic right now.
   I purchased the ipod classic knowing that i’d use it as an external drive.But when you’re out to buy a player my suggestion is DO NOT buy it.

   K that’s about all i can think of right now.Maybe i’ll come and edit my post someday if i come up with anything more

7. edge0 January 11th, 2008 at 1:17 pm 7

   good post azaas…i welcome your opinions and comments…you are probably 100% right about the flash player…i know many people who had to buy newer models of their player and were unable to use some of their older things…a big time memory flash based player (ex. 80 gb or 160gb) will undoubtedly be a huge hit whenever it hits the market…unfortunately there are people who can’t wait for them to come out, and need a larger capacity mp3 player and are forced to buy a hard drive version…that’s the pickle consumers are currently in…

8. kaseyart January 11th, 2008 at 3:10 pm 8

   I agree with alot of what has been said here. Everyone is intitled to their own opinions.  That is what I have noticed on this site.  There really isn’t any “bashing.” I guess the one thing I have to ask is: am I the only one out there that is not really sold and in aw of the touch screen technology?  Don’t get me wrong I have messed with a iPod touch and iPhone. Although the touch screen technology was cool, it just did nothing for me. When I say that I mean did nothing to make me want to buy it because of that. I may be wrong, but touch technology isn’t that new is it? I think I remember things being touch screen some years ago.  Now maybe the fact it is on personal devices is why the big push, but I just don’t know.  I am reminded of the scene in Back to the Future 2 when Marty goes into the Cafe 80’s and there is a Wild Gunman game in which Marty shows the future kids how to play.  After seeing this the kids say “what, you have to use your hands.” My point is soon there will be something else that is neater then touch screens and we will look back on the fact that somethnig has touch screen as a gimmck. When are gimmicks going to stop selling products and what the product can do be the big seller.  Now I know I probably just made a lot of people mad, but thought I would add my 2 cents in. Also to comment on something else said.  The fact the Zune does play the radio did help in why I wanted one.  I like my choice of songs, but sometimes the radio is nice.  Good comments everyone and good points.  i knew I liked this site for a reason.

9. edge0 January 11th, 2008 at 3:19 pm 9

   The radio is definitely cool. It brings a fresh air to my listening habits. I would imagine the radio is useful b/c that’s one way people will hear new songs, that they might want to purchase to put on their player. What better way to do that then integrating it with the player. The next step would be where you can listen to the radio, and if you like the song purchase it right there. The bottom line is that things will always change and improve, and if you are afraid to buy something b/c you are worried about the ‘new’ thing set to come out, then you will never buy anything.

   Nice Back to the Future reference kasey…

10. kaseyart January 11th, 2008 at 3:31 pm 10

    Totally agree edge.  I know a few people that are still waiting for that perfect computer or phone.  It took me a while to get into DVDs and now look it’s going to HD or BluRay. Although I think it’s all going digital.  I have thought the same thing about hearing a song on the radio and being able to buy right then would be great.  Oh and the Back to the Futures movies are some of my favorites. If you couldn’t tell. 

11. azaas January 12th, 2008 at 1:33 am 11

    @kaseyart

    Actually i think you’re prwtty wrong on touch tech.Actually not wrong but from my point of view you seem to be underestimating it a lot.Things have been touch screen quite a few times in the past.But for sure not at the same point to what touch tech has become nowdays.The user exp with the older touch tech seem to be rather "punching" the screen [lol] than actually touching it.
    Now about touch tech getting old eventually,i completelly agree with you that someday that will happen,although now i seem unable to see exactly HOW this will happen.I mean i could see the future in touch tech all the way through the "mouse era" but now i can’t see the future at all [maybe voice commands?that would require one heck of an A.I. though].But just cause things shall change,in let’s say a couple of decades [judging on how long it took the industry to start throwing the mouse into the recycle bin lol] that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be excited about it right now.Touch is not only the present but the near future as well and my god i can’t wait for things to have a "Minority report" like user experience.
    As for something being neater than touch tech i can’t see that happening,in the sense that touch tech is not only neat but user friendly as well.I mean i could get my grandpa to use the iphone where i’ve failed to teach him use any other phone i’ve owned so far.My little bro can do magic on it!!
    In my opinion,and again this is just my opinion,touch tech will create the same "flood" as both the mouse and pcs had back in the days.It has already and will keep redifining people’s perception of a phone,of a computer maybe even of a tv.Maybe someday it will get outdated,but i sure can’t see keyboards and mice having many years to live from now on

12. kaseyart January 12th, 2008 at 3:33 pm 12

    azaas: I totally see your point on touch technology. It will be something that everything has I am sure. I didn’t mean to come off as saying it was a great thing because it is. It is very cool and user friendly. I think what I was trying to get across is that it is not the one big selling point for me to buy something. For example: phones, for my business I need basically a smart phone. I personally use a blackjack II and love it. I have a few friends that have an iPhone and I have used one before. When I looked at phones I looked at a phone that would be the best for what I needed. I don’t need a phone to play music, I don’t need to surf the net on a 2″ screen.? I need it to make and receive calls, be clear in those calls and be able to send and receive email. When I used the iPhone I had more issues than with my Blackjack so I went with the blackjack. All my friends could say was that the iPhone had a touchscreen. Don’t care. Now when it came to a MP3 player I looked at both iPod and Zune. Zune had just a little more bonuses that made the sell. I didn’t even look at the iPod Touch. I just didn’t see why pay more for less space just because it had a touchscreen. Now if the Zune had a touchscreen then great, but it woul dnot have been a selling piont. That is all I was really trying to say. Just because something has a touchscreen doesn’t make it better.

    I like your views azaas. You seem like a person that does their research as do I.

13. FatalFlaw January 12th, 2008 at 4:58 pm 13

    I’ve played with the iPod touch, and the iPhone. And I love them. They’re excellent products, and I will most likely buy one in the future, though not the near future. It’s not that I like Microsoft over Apple, in fact, I tend to buy Apple Products.

    Flash Drives and Touch Screens are the future of most entertainment, and I’ll agree to that. But, while that is true, an 80GB Flash touch screen media player for that price range isn’t available. I bought the Zune because it fills a niche untouched by Apple - a large capacity player with a big screen.

    I love the touch screen on the iTouch, and I loved web browsing on it. I really did. But with someone like me, who has thousands of songs, 16GB doesn’t cut it for me.

14. Adam Ross January 12th, 2008 at 9:14 pm 14

    well i have an ipod touch and an iphone (gift) and they are great. but once i got the iphone the touch just seemed…..well i wanted more. it has more potential. I am probably gonna sell the itouch for an 80gb zune or something because i dont have one. 

15. hmg_guy January 12th, 2008 at 9:50 pm 15

    Not a surprise the new zunes are so cool! wish I have one

16. Adam Ross January 12th, 2008 at 10:00 pm 16

    yup they are awesome. my friend has one and i like it.

17. azaas January 13th, 2008 at 3:58 am 17

    @kaseyart : Thx for your good words mate.I really didn’t even hope to find such great persons in here when i first joined the site.You and edge0 seem to be great and i can’t wait getting into arguments with you,when the next articles hit the site Afterall,it’s one of those cases you just wish for the other person to have a different opinion,just so you can gain something out of it

    Now to the point,blackjack is probably one of the best devices out there.And my god i couldn’t agree more on touch technology not being the thing to look for when buying a product.But…and check this out…just imagine the blackjack with a huge screen,IE10  on it so making it able not only to surf the web the way it’s meant to be,but also give you the best mail experience you could get,being able to view pdfs on it,working with excel on it,making calls on it,having 160gigs of flash mem on it,having a high def screen on it,being able to play both audio and video files on it and all of that to be used with the touch of your fingers!!!Trust me when i say that the iphone is not even close to being perfect.I mean you can’t copy and paste on the damn thing BUT,it’s a glimpse to the future.And this future is closer than what people think.My prediction is that in 2008/09 period,we’ll see devices like the iphone getting close to perfect.Windows mobile devices shall be touch tech very soon and my god can’t wait for competition to jump into touch field :)

    ps:Just came to my mind,that given the fact that all that will be on flash mem,i wonder what MS firmware updates will be like?I mean updating your device via wi-fi,being able to purchase online new software for your device [let’s say gmaps]….Thank you god for letting me live the digital era *sniff sniff [i seriously am about this close to weeping…geek alert lol]

18. kaseyart January 13th, 2008 at 10:29 pm 18

    @azaas, I have to agree.  I like having people to go back and forth with.  Now what you said about the blackjack made me think. If the blackjack had a touchscreen it would be an even better phone.  Now I still don’t see it as the reason I would buy one over another phone, but would be an awesome plus. Like you said the future is closer than we think and I can not wait to see what it brings.

19. adamross55 January 13th, 2008 at 11:47 pm 19

    the only reason to put a touch screen is 1 cause its way cool and 2 its easier to navigate in some cases.

20. azaas January 14th, 2008 at 2:07 am 20

    @kaseyart : Glad you saw my point.Of course a touch screen would not be the thing to make you choose it over an other phone,but my god it’d look amazing.Internet Explorer would look amazing on it [not those mob version explorers but the real deal] and maybe even a full office pack [that may sound a bit weird right now,but again not so far in the future ].Can’t wait for windows mobile devices to start their counterattack to Apple’s iphone ^_^

21. kaseyart January 14th, 2008 at 9:34 am 21

    OK,  no I have something else to add. Just the other day my wife and I were at a get together some friends were having when I saw someone with a Zune. I had mine in my pocket so we compared and talked about what we liked and didn’t like. We both had wireless on and started talking about syncing and what not.  Well we both noticed that there was no notification (sound) of a Zune that is near by unless we were looking at the screen. I was wondering if anyone else thought that having a notification sound if there is a Zune near by would be a good idea? Now maybe a sound that you can turn on/off of course.  Not sure if I would want to hear it everytime I was listening to some music. Wasn’t sure where else to post this.

22. edge0 January 14th, 2008 at 9:49 am 22

    Good idea….There should be something like that or else how would you know if someone else has one…unless they are holding it out….maybe they can do something like a cell phone where if you don’t want it on…you can put it to vibrate…

23. azaas January 14th, 2008 at 11:14 am 23

    @kaseyart :great idea mate.I’ve never thought about that one hehe Let’s just hope Bill looks at our site so he can add that feature through a firmware update lol

24. dcalvaneso January 14th, 2008 at 2:21 pm 24

    I’m a little bit late to this, but it’s been a busy weekend. My standard caveat of "I’m not a Zune owner, just someone with an inteterest in DMPs who thinks the Zune looks *really* nice." applies here. Now, that said, in what little time I’ve had to fiddle with the Zune 2 I’ve been very impressed with the *hardware*, and that’s great, but the hardware is really only half of the equation. My main worry is that the Zune Marketplace software isn’t quite as robust as iTunes in terms of library management. While it’s true that it does have a leg up on Apple in the form of the Zune Pass (a fantastic idea, btw. I’m not sure if such a thing would keep me from wanting to own my own music, but I also think it’s affordable enough to allow you to fill your player and then make very informed purchases if you decide at a later date you’d prefer to own something.), I do have the software installed on my PC and the apparent lack of smart playlist functionality is a little bit of a turnoff. I have a large collection, and I listen to a lot of music — at work, at home on my PC, during my commute, etc. It’s extremely handy to have smart paylist functionality to be able to separate out music recorded in a specific year, added to the library at a certain time, live shows within a genre, music tagged by mood, etc. I can do these things with iTunes, and while hardware and interface and pricing plans are absolutely very important things, at the end of the day it’s all about a unit’s base functionality — its ability to deliver your music to you and to give you control over that.

    Don’t misunderstand, I’m not bashing the Zune at all. These are things that I really hope to see implemented in future software and firmware updates. It could be that for most people they’re complete non-issues. Maybe even for me. I just wanted to share my thoughts.

25. soccerfreak24 January 14th, 2008 at 9:10 pm 25

    Well, It definitely shows through that microfoft got it right this time. People are really starting to like the new device, and love the big screen. A large concern I have is the 4/8 screen’s… the black sqaure surrounding the LCD screen seems.. a little.. big.. Don’t get me wrong, it’s microsofts first attempt at flash.. but I think in the next generation it’d be a great idea to try and utilize the space better, giving it an edge on apple’s nano.

26. kaseyart January 19th, 2008 at 11:02 am 26

    Not to beat a dead horse, but to reply to something I said above. Touch tech is a great thing, but there will be something else that will be the talk and “next big thing” Well I think this might be it. Yes it’s in it’s early state, but shows what might be next.

    http://gizmodo.com/346845/orange-shows-off-gesture-based-interaction-screen-touch-screens-look-on-in-horror

27. Xerosis January 19th, 2008 at 11:12 am 27

    Am I the only one who hates all of these gimicky control methods? I think the Zune pad type navigation is as close as I’d ever get to “touch screen” crap…I mean, if the next Zune has a touch screen I won’t buy it…

28. Soccerfreak24 January 19th, 2008 at 11:28 am 28

    Kaseyart: OMG thats pretty awesome.. it’d be intereting though on a screen like the zunes, they’d have to make it very precise. If they made it though, it’d leave the ipod touch in the dust. But then again, I don’t believe touch screen is even necassary at this moment in time, and isnt worth all the extra money people pay for it.. Haha, this is a prettty stupid idea for this point in time, but it’d be so cool if we could control it with brain waves.. In this vid I watched in BIO a paralyzed guy was able to use a computer by just thinking a way he wanted the mouse to move.. imagine if zunes had that!(especially how much they’d cost :D)

29. Soccerfreak24 January 19th, 2008 at 11:36 am 29

    dcalvaneso: Well, I mostly agree with what your saying. The zune software is definitely lacking a lot of features.. a simple one i’ve noticed is that you can’t even sort playlists by artist(at least I don’t think). The software is still very new, and I think microsoft will learn a lot from the customer dissatisfaction, and hopefully bring a lot of those features into the next gen zune software like you were saying. It seems they focused a lot to make a great device, next gen the software needs to come up to par.

30. kaseyart January 19th, 2008 at 11:50 am 30

    Xerosis: I am right with you.  I love the Zune pad. Touch screen just doesn’t do it for me. Plus I am one of those people who hate smudges on screens so that might be another reason.

31. azaas January 20th, 2008 at 4:05 am 31

    @kaseyart : For the love of god that was freaking awesome video there mate Well i reffered to touch tech as a "Minority report" like experience,but this is far more impressive.Should have seen this coming,after having seen what Surface is capable of with those sensors :(  *azaas slaps himself lol