Gotta Love that Zune

Third Microsoft commercial, aired yesterday on The Office. Makes more sense, and gets its point across well, I feel.

Yes, yes indeed, I am on a mission to convert the ignorant (read: iPod owners) to the light.

That's not the way to start if I'm trying to win people over, is it. Ok, let me start over. While I understand your choice of the iPod, and I do not deny it's success and great features, I strongly feel that Microsoft is making a case, slowly, that it is a player to take into serious consideration when purchasing your next music player, because you know you are going to get another one within the next 3 or 4 years.

Let us first discuss the reasons why you purchased the iPod:

• It used to be the best thing out there, the cool thing to purchase
  
• It had a circle wheel, and circles are cool
  
• It held all your music. ALL of it.
• iTunes was the best way to organize your music, and it was simple, user friendly
• The iPod led the revolution with new ideas, including the Nano, the Video, the Touch.

All understandable, and hell, if I had a couple hundred to throw around back then, who knows, I might not be writing this article and instead, editing a movie on my MacBook Air.

The truth is, however, that the Zune has slowly crept up and answered most of these questions. I'll employ the same bullet fashion to make it clear and concise:

• It is the best thing out there. Hands down
• It has a squircle. Take that circle.
• The Zune media player wipes the floor with iTunes
• You see the new Nano? Seem familiar? Yeah, it is exactly like the Zune 8/16 with the turn sideways to view movies design

Ok, I'll be serious now.

I will admit that the player is not as good as the iPod yet, at least for others. The iPod Touch is hands down, the best player on the market, and it's controls and funtion are great. I, however, am not trying to win you over now. Remember, I'm trying to win you within the next 3 years or so, and I have a $300 million advertising deal that I'll be employing, along with Seinfeld, to get to you. Within 3 years, I can see the Zune coming out with a touch based player, and unless iPod completely reinvents the game (which I'm not ruling out), the players will be identical, and you will be forced to choose between software, firmware, and purchasing to make your decision.

Let's look at firmware: its firmware is more intuitive than the iPod, but becasue the whole world was brought up on iPod's, this no longer matters. For me, however, the Zune made much more sense to me than going in a circle to go up, down, left and right. On top of that, it looks a lot better than iPod's, which is completely shocking, as apple is known for aesthetics as well as function. But no one in their right mind can deny that the Zune player has a much better format than that of the iPod's. Test one out when you're at Walmart/Best Buy, and you'll see what I mean.

Now, for the software. If you were to say that the zune firmware is prettier than the iPod by a factor, of say, 2, then the Zune software would be prettier than iTunes by a factor of 24.89, and no less. There is no way to put it in words, except that it just looks amazing, from how it organizes lists, all the options you have for picking how you want to view your titles, the fact that it finds all the album art quickly without you needing an account, the music player's album art mosaic with the new artist specific info. It's all around flat out amazing, so the next time you see me, remind me to show you. Or, if you are one of those free minded spirits, go ahead and download it yourself to check it out.

The final frontier is the purchasing. iTunes owns the market (literally and figuratively), and there's nothing that can be done about that for now. I have not even test driven it yet, to be honest. But Zune's purchasing is very intuitive, and plus, they have this functino called MixView, which according to gizmodo.com and engadget.com, is way better than genius bar, and available to everyone. It takes the artist/song that you have selected, and finds music and artists that have influenced and have been influenced by that artist, and provides their album art in a cool, mosaic style with different sizes that flat out looks nice.

Zune also has a social scene, much like facebook/myspace, in that you can get friends, have a profile, and share music with each other. In the Mixview, the top listeners to that artist are listed, and you can view their music from there.

Overall, the zune has much work to do to establish itself within the market. There is no doubt, however, that it has a secure hold on position number 2, and within 3 years or so, I can see it rivaling apple for its hold on mp3 players. Yeah, yeah, I know you guys are probably saying "that fool is crazy". But that's what I was saying back when Windows flat out owned the market and the new color iMac's had just come out. I don't need to elaborate for you to know where this one is going.