My Christmas present, a few weeks ago, was a wonderful surprise. Since three weeks or so I am the proud owner of a brand new Zune device and I simply love it. For the last two years I have been using an Apple iPod, which I really liked and which helped me getting through some long, boring Trans Atlantic flights. I am pretty sure that is all going to change from now on. Today I flew from Phoenix to Seattle and I had the chance to seriously test drive my Zune during a 3 hour flight. The only thing I can say is that I am very happy with the device. Sure, I had to get used to its user interface, a little different from the iPod, but after 5 minutes very intuitive and easy to use. My iPod was a G3 version, equipped with a 40 GByte hard drive, but no video playback capabilities. Well, the Zune with 30 GByte has a smaller hard drive, but I can watch video’s now. So prior to the my trip to Seattle I made sure to have half of the Zune’s hard drive filled with video’s, actually over 100 hours of movies and TV shows. This is very cool, I now can catch up with great series like Lost and Boston Legal, all while flying from destination to destination. The other half of the Zune’s hard drive is filled with music. I used a 14 day trial subscription to the Zune download service. This subscription service contains a huge database of music, all available for download. Using the subscription it is possible to download thousands of songs that you can play forever as long as you have a valid subscription. I have to admit that I never believed in a subscription service for music, that is, until now. For the price of approximately one CD / month I literally have access to all the music I possibly want to have on my Zune. Not only recent music, but also great classics. Together with 15 GByte of video content I have around 15 GByte of audio content, bringing the free space of my Zune back to 400 MByte. However, with a subscription service it is no problem that the device’s hard drive is completely filled. Whenever I get tired of some music, I simply delete it and replace it by other music. My first impressions are that the sound quality of the Zune is superior to the sound quality of my 2 year old iPod. I am not sure if this is because of the sound quality of the device or because the content I downloaded is of better quality. However, so far I am very happy with the Zune. Too bad it is not available in Europe yet. You might wonder if I only have positive things to say about the Zune. I wish that were true, but there are a few things that definitely needs improvement. Synchronizing content between the Zune and a PC takes too much time. With my entirely filled up Zune, it takes me about 30 minutes to synchronize all content. This is an area where Apple is superior with iTunes. Hopefully Microsoft realizes this as well. I can’t wait for an update of the Zune software with a more efficient synchronization algorithm. Also, one or two times I had some gaps in playback of music files. Again, this is probably something that can be solved easily with an update of the Zune firmware or its application software. Anyway, my first impressions are definitely positive. So positive that the Zune became my media device of choice the minute I started playing with it.

Maarten Struys