So I bought a Zune whilst I was in California. My old MP3 player, a Creative Labs Zen was just getting too long in the tooth and didn't hold all my music so I was due an upgrade anyway and what with being a fan boy I really only had one option. Of course I simply had to get the brown one.
First impressions were good, the packaging was simply gorgeous and the Microsoft logo was hidden away on the base so you'd never see it unless you were looking. The box slide up and off to reveal the device, head phones and sync cable. A leaflet containing instructions, a "sock" and the software CD was in a separate compartment. I've never seen Microsoft package anything so well before.
Once the device was out and plugged in I started the Zune software (and was amused to get a firmware patch straight away). Frankly it feels unfinished. It looks and feels like Windows Media Player 11, with plugin functionality removed (annoying, no last.fm, no "Now playing" in Windows Live Messenger and no blogging plugins). Worse still it doesn't use WMP's database, so it had to import all the music again. I then synced the device and it pulled everything across. Then the spelling mistakes raised their heads and I went on a meta data correction hunt. Again the software lets you down. As WMP is my player of choice I changed the meta data in WMP and of course the Zune software didn't pick this up, so I had to correct it again in the Zune database. Once you've corrected your meta data you have to manually queue the correct files for syncing when really it should do this for you; after all what is automatic syncing for? Every time you plug the Zune in the software manually scans the device and rebuilds its database of device tracks, images and videos which gives an annoying delay of up to 10 minutes on my device. This makes managing the device itself horribly slow, especially when you want to do something like delete tracks; no there's no way to delete files on the device itself. Playlists are synced though, one of the problems I had on the Zen; building playlists in WMP or the Zune software is easy.
The quality of the Zune itself isn't evident from pictures; my brown Zune has a lovely green tinge to it on a perspex like surround, it looks lovely. The device UI isn't bad; however album art is only visible when browsing albums (and obviously on playback), whereas on the PC software it's viewable when browsing by artists and songs, which would be preferable. Scrolling through is easy, no constant whirring of your finger around a wheel, simply click up or down and hold. The sound quality seems fine, the headphones aren't wonderful and they certainly aren't as iconic as the white headphones on an iPod but they don't distort at normal volumes (important when you're listening to Mogwai. For those of you wanting to listen to CDs that have live music you'll be annoyed by the typical gap between plays, gapless playback please Microsoft and soon. Adjusting the volume on the device has a very small response on screen; this could/should be larger so you can see clearly what you're doing. Video playback seems fair enough, I'm experimenting with M2Convert which will happily rip DVDs (err, those unprotected ones I have, *cough*), however again the video interface seems unfinished somehow; they're only classified by music or movies. Where's television? Series? Actor? If you're left handed there's no way to flip everything, so you will have to learn to control video playback with your right hand.
Radio support is so-so. Henley is in a bad area for reception, so all it can find is Radio Berkshire and the device picks up the broadcasted station name. However I can't get Radio 4 or Virgin, which my clock radio can find quite happily. When you bookmark a radio station it stores the frequency not the detected station name.
The battery life is so much better than my Zen, it happily played for the flight between San Francisco and London and still had a bunch of power left. The headphones are magnetised so they stick together nicely, but of course the cable still gets everywhere. The provided "sock" is way too tight though, it's hard to put the device into it and there's no room for the headphones. Of course the store doesn't work in the UK, but annoyingly every search in the Zune PC software returns results from it; if I don't have an account why bother with this? Let me turn it off! The device provides "flagging" which is interesting, you flag a track on the device while it plays and it will be marked in the PC software when you sync next. I'm also annoyed by yet another non-standard sync cable to lose; it also feels very fragile, so I ended up buying a second sync cable because I'm paranoid. Oh and where's podcasting support? I can download with Feedstation and the Zune software will eventually detect new files, but it's nowhere near seemless. You can setup dynamic playlists on the PC, so I can setup a "My podcasts" playlist which includes all the files in the FeedStation download directory but this doesn't sync to the device, so you're reduced to scrolling through the artist list to find your newest podcasts. Syncing smart playlists or providing a "Recently synced" list on the device would solve this nicely.
So "welcome to the community"? Well, not in the UK, I imagine I will wander London, lost, lonely looking for someone to share with, but I'm generally pleased. Wireless syncing over WiFi would be a major improvement of course, but I'm sure the Zune team have heard that lots already. Does it count as a community if I'm the only member in my area? <g>