Zune Improvements

As we've seen by now, Zune was released to great fanfare but mostly ignored by
purchasers. There are certainly a number of reasons for this, and this might be
a good thread to collect them (and their solutions, of course). I'll start the
discussion with the following:

Color - gimme a break, guys...what kind of idiot came up with white, black and
brown (and the infamous 100 pink ones)? And while we're about it, why not
transparent, or translucent, or flourescent? We are geeks, after all...
Flash - having a hard drive is fine for the over-achievers, but what about us in
the real world? I'd never ski or climb or even do yard work with a music player
that has moving parts (i.e., hard drive). Give us activists a flash version.
Size - again, what's the problem here? Miniturization has already been solved.
Use it. For inspiration on size, look to the lovely 8Gb iPod Nano, the new even
smaller one that clips to your sleeve, the Creative series, the new Kingston
KPex.
Standards - what idiot decided that the Zune would not Play For Sure?
Software - it's fine for the average Joe, but what about geeks? Give us the
ability to have it look like a USB hard drive, like every other MP3 player on
the market (except for the iPods, of course).
API - is this thing built on Windows CE? How about a development API where we
can come up with killer apps for Zune?

And I'm wondering here...what exactly can I do with a Zune that I cannot do with
my Dell Axim PPC? The Dell can play music, can play videos, can wirelessly share
files. The only difference I can think of is storage size (Dell is limited to SD
card storage) and battery life.

Dana

7.   Released in other territories - External markets can drum up support for it
at home as well, the internet can make it a "must" have item this
holiday if enough people get their hands on it

8.   Wireless use - The wireless at the moment seems to be little more than a
gimick, it lacks that edge it needs. Something as simple as RSS headlines could
be good enough to win people over

9.   Marketing - Much respect to Bill and all he's acheived but I don't think
him personally handing them out is going to make them any more appealing, now if
say Eva Green  was handing them out, that might be a different story...

I can't personally comment on wether it's a decent player or not but their are
some potential things that I think that could of been handled better.

danacline:

6. API - is this thing built on Windows CE? How about a development API where we
can come up with killer apps for Zune?

Dana,

I also completely disappointed on this, This is where Zune has potentially
killer area to work with, lets allow developers to do some killer apps, if Zune
designed to integrate with windows sideshow, it could have lots of cool widgets,
and would be a killer product...

Yeah, they could just make it another target mobile device for Visual
Studio...that'd be cool.

I can envision a killer app for this...you select from menus to set up your
"profile"...age, gender, race, religion, hair color, etc. You also set
up a profile of your perfect mate. Then any time you're within wireless range of
someone who matches your profile, the Zune pings you. You could broadcast your
profile to anyone, or be in stealth mode and just read their profiles and ping
back if desired. In a crowded city (or nightclub), this could be an interesting
app...especially if you have yours broadcast a thumbnail picture of you or your
avatar...

Dana

Wow. Talk about getting' your hate on. ;-) Some responses... 1) White and black
are very standard, no surprises there. Brown is a "hip" colour and
very popular among the younger generation. I think, sadly, most geek bloggers
are still wearing acid washed jeans and their Star Trek t-shirts (hey, I have a
couple too!) and really have no business talking about whether or not brown is
cool. A friend of mine bought one, and it's very nice looking. I'd like to see
other colours - like a red or blue - but I think the three they launched with
were just fine. 2) They had time to launch one player, and they needed a big
player for the WiFi, screen, etc. Flash players will certainly come later, but
who the hell would buy a Flash player that was almost as big as a hard drive
based player? There's nothing social about wee arm-loaded Flash players, and
social was the entire marketing push. I'm curious, have you had a hard drive
based player? I've had several and have never had an issue using them while
traveling, moving, etc. Certainly for at the gym, a small flash player like the
Shuffle is preferred, but hard drives aren't as fragile as you think. 3) Give
this article a read for an understanding of the size. I too would have liked to
have had it smaller/thinner, but this article explains why it's not (for better
or worse):http://www.zunethoughts.com/news/show/382/ 4) Lots of reasons why its
not PlaysForSure:http://www.zunethoughts.com/news/show/224/The lack of DVR-MS
support is incredibly stupid, but I know that a beta version of the Zune desktop
software that is being used internally at Microsoft has DVR-MS transcoding
support, so it's coming... 5) I agree that the lack of USB mass storage support
is ultra-lame. Thankfully, there's a hack until they really let it
work:http://www.zunescene.com/zune-mass-storage-mod/ 6) Yes, it's built on
Windows CE. APIs....oh boy, what a potential mess! You have to remember that
Microsoft's vision for the Zune is all about simplicity and doing what the iPod
does, only better. Imagine the support calls when some rogue app crashes a
player...I live in the Windows Mobile world, and I'm keenly aware of how badly
behaved third party applications can cause all sorts of problems. And regarding
the differences between it and an Axim, it's all about interface, simplicity.
The Pocket PC is a computer - the Zune is an appliance. It's like the difference
between your desktop PC and a Tivo. Sure, both can record digital video...but
they do it in very different ways from an end-user perspective. - Jason
<danacline> wrote in message news:19813@hive.net...

As we've seen by now, Zune was released to great fanfare but mostly ignored by
purchasers. There are certainly a number of reasons for this, and this might be
a good thread to collect them (and their solutions, of course). I'll start the
discussion with the following:

Color - gimme a break, guys...what kind of idiot came up with white, black and
brown (and the infamous 100 pink ones)? And while we're about it, why not
transparent, or translucent, or flourescent? We are geeks, after all... 
Flash - having a hard drive is fine for the over-achievers, but what about us in
the real world? I'd never ski or climb or even do yard work with a music player
that has moving parts (i.e., hard drive). Give us activists a flash version. 
Size - again, what's the problem here? Miniturization has already been solved.
Use it. For inspiration on size, look to the lovely 8Gb iPod Nano, the new even
smaller one that clips to your sleeve, the Creative series, the new Kingston
KPex. 
Standards - what idiot decided that the Zune would not Play For Sure? Nor play
DVR-MS files from Media Center? 
Software - it's fine for the average Joe, but what about geeks? Give us the
ability to have it look like a USB hard drive, like every other MP3 player on
the market (except for the iPods, of course). 
API - is this thing built on Windows CE? How about a development API where we
can come up with killer apps for Zune?

And I'm wondering here...what exactly can I do with a Zune that I cannot do with
my Dell Axim PPC? The Dell can play music, can play videos, can wirelessly share
files. The only difference I can think of is storage size (Dell is limited to SD
card storage) and battery life.

Dana
http://hive.net/member/forums/thread/19813.aspx