Zune Disapointments

Yes, well, so I'm piling on....

I've been intrigued by the notion of a wifi-enabled music player, and figured the innovation
(why hasn't Apple done this yet?) would be cool. Sadly, from my recent reading...

Wifi is unusable for anything other than talking to other Zunes, This includes syncing to your PC, or even buying music. Hotspots? Forget it...

It doesn’t work with Windows Media Player – it has its own separate app! You’ve got to be kidding. This is where the “skunkworks team” approach really broke down for them.

They’ve crippled it so you can’t use it as a portable drive. That eliminates it for me as a photographer.

DRM is applied to everything indiscriminately, thus ruining it for p2p distribution of say, independent music, or your own stuff.

Apparently also has none of the standard ipod stuff: No games, alarm, volume limiter, volume limiter, etc – not that this is a deal breaker for most folks, but might tip the balance for some.

Now for something really silly... you have to buy points in increments of $5 to buy music. A typical music track costs 79 points. 79 points costs 99 cents. They are really trying hard to make sure it fails.

Not that they won’t try to power through with this over a long period of time – too bad they didn’t get some of the basics right.

Wifi – the way they’ve implemented it - is only interesting if there are a LOT of other Zune users
out there, which means they way they are rolling this out makes one of the primary technical differentiators not very interesting to begin with.

Unless they make the wifi work more generally, it won’t have an edge as a podcasting device, either. Sigh.

CNN commentary:


BuyTV Review:


-bw