Arriving late to a party can sometimes be quite fashionable, Microsoft's late entry to the MP3 market is a bit like turning up ad everyone is already hold up in the kitchen having a great time. So the Microsoft Zune that arrived with us for review is going to have a tough time gaining acceptance with the well established MP3 crowd which is firmly in love the the Apple iPod. The Microsoft Zune has launched in the USA and is soon to land in the UK, we secured our unit shipped from the US which is a 30gb model styled in black one of the limited choices at launch. First impressions are always critical and the packaging was very well executed making it clear to us that this was no cheapo player and at around £190 this 30gb model isn't cheap! The box opens like a drawer and then a flap hinges to reveal the Zune nested with earphones one side and connector cable the other. The Zune is bigger than we'd have hoped (112 × 61 × 14 mm), it's mainly the thickness which when compared to the newer iPod feels approximately doubled the girth. The finish is a kind of finely textured plastic that is used on the IBM / lenovo laptops lids, it does a great job of making the plastic coating feel quite good. Again its not quite up to the standards set by the iPod but overall Microsoft have done a good job wit the subjective qualities of their new MP3 player.
Front and centre of the new unit is a 3" colour screen which dominates the layout with the navigation pad and two buttons nestled under it. Power up your Zune for the first time and you'll soon see that there is an operating system lurking on the hard drive as you watch the start-up screen and feel the hard drive vibrate into action. Give it 10 seconds and the rather bland menu screen appears which on a V 1.0 firmware device is a bit sparse with options for Video, Audio, Pictures and Settings. This was the hint we needed to plug up the Zune to our host PC and install the supplied Zune Software from CD.
Now you may be expecting us to struggle installing Microsoft software and sadly you'd be right, the basic install from CD was smooth enough but when the application started it did 2 things. Firstly it starts to index your music collection which seemed to slow down the PC to a crawl and then it took over the USB bus causing both our mouse and wireless keyboard to intermittently connect making it very difficult to do anything. After several attempts at this process we managed to get the indexing to stop long enough to regain control of the PC and sort out the USB connections so that the Zune sat connected stably and didn't effect the other devices.
With our Zune connected we left the PC to finish indexing, which it duly did meaning we could start the synchronisation over the the MP3 unit in order to proceed with tests. Microsoft ship the Zune with a number of pre installed audio tracks and videos but you'll want to get your own on ASAP. It took around 15 minutes to push all our audio tracks over the USB 2.0 connection which is fairly swift, however the video was quite a surprise. We naively expected that the WMV files pre ripped on our machine would simply transfer and play on another windows device but instead they had to go via a transcode step in the Zune Software. It transpires that anything outside the exact 320x240 resolution of the player needs the whole file to be transcoded, explaining why our WMV files needed a lengthy (40 minute) process.With media loaded onto our Zune (taking up over 21gb) we were able to start testing using the Microsoft supplied earphones and a fully charged lithium Ion battery. Music can be viewed by Artist, Album, Genre, Track or playlist, the interface uses the left right controls on the pad to move a header on the screen which changes the way the list is presented to the user below. The control pad which looks like a wheel is in fact a 4 way control with central ok button and is in no way like a click wheel as found on the iPod. After a few hours use the whole set-up becomes second nature and you start to appreciate the way that when scrolling through a list of tracks at speed the first letter is shown in large font on the right of the screen, making it easy to see your progress though the alphabet.
Finally select a song you want to play and let rip, the large screen changes to show the album art and the earphone fill with clear and yet well weighted music. We tested with a variety of tracks from our normal Fatboy Slim and Hammond organ mix to Frank Sinatra each with very different characteristics but each testing the Zunes audio qualities and finding it to be a well rounded performer. Throughout our review period we were unable to find any hint of hiss, electronic noise or distortion that can be attributed to the MS Zune and it is easily on a par with Apples players albeit it with a slightly warmer and richer bass which may or may not be to some peoples tastes. MS Zune handles MP3, WMA (with or without DRM), WAV and Apples ACC format but not with DRM.
Microsoft beat Apple hands down when it comes to the supplied earphones, the Apple earbuds are nasty objects which are both uncomfortable and poor quality whereas the MS offerings are clearly built to a price but they sit ok in the ear and do justice to the audio capabilities of the Zune. Choose to pair the player with a good set of earphones like our test Shure E2C's and you get a pretty stunning package, one that is hard to beat without spending many hundreds more. We were disappointed to find that version 1.2 (434) firmware does not support gapless playback and the various mix albums suffer from a nasty click as you change tracks.
Zune supports video as we mentioned earlier and this is really not much of a selling point as many many MP3 players now do this, however a number of them only support short clips and Apples iPod suffers from a small screen and picky file format acceptance. We tested with Windows media ripped files from DVD and managed to enjoy the whole of Oceans Eleven in portrait mode to make the most of the large screen. Watching video was a smooth and seamless experience with reasonable quality images and good sound quality which is obviously dependant on the quality of your video ripping. However it is clear to see that Zune is starting further along the evolutionary path than the iPod and already has put one over its rival.Image viewing is always a bit of an also ran when it comes to MP3 players but it is nicely implemented here with a choice of image display speeds and transitions along with a random shuffle mode and thumbnail viewing. There is also an FM tuner something else Apple still sell as an extra, here it's RDS capable too showing station name and genre, we had to chuckle when our display showed Radio 2 as "Oldies" never realised they categorised listeners too.
Like the late comers to a party Zune does have an advantage it can learn from the mistakes of other and listen to what others say is missing, a bit like getting a text saying the party is fresh out of beer. So what Microsoft adds is Wireless connectivity, when we say add we really do mean add. A version 1.0 firmware device (like ours as shipped) doesn't seem to have wireless but upgrade firmware to 1.2 and bingo you get a menu called community? What they really mean is a 802.11 b/g wireless lan connection as standard which can at present only talk to other Zunes, which when reviewing a Zune in the UK is a bit like being the only gay in the village. It took us 5 days to find another Zune users to test this feature with, but it was worth the search.
You can select a track, video or picture and share it with another Zune. Each device has its own name which you can define these can then be seen if enabled (a bit like Bluetooth) and you can use them to send tracks to. We tested with another Zune called Zippy and pushed a track over which was there in about 30 seconds after which it could be played off Zippys hard drive. Tracks can be played a maximum of 3 times before they are locked or a maximum of 3 days, you can then choose to purchase them from Microsoft's online store the "Zune Marketplace" which is their version of iTunes.Battery life is rather disappointing and in our tests with the Zune WiFi switched on we managed just under 12 hours playback of MP3 files and with the WiFi switched off this improved to around 13.5 hours. Video playback eats battery as you'd expect and a 3 hour movie will all but drain the battery requiring you to hook it up to a USB port for a 180 minute charge.
Overall Microsoft have produced a worthy device that handles MP3 and ACC files well with a workable video playback system and promising WiFi if only we could use it for more than Zune to Zune connections. Sadly the market needs to move forward and this new player feels like a small shuffle rather than a leap ahead, with Apple claiming 75% of the market in the USA with the Zune on sale it doesn't look good for the UK launch scheduled sometime in 2007, that's as firm as it gets from Microsoft.
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