Zune Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

Here's a funny short someone cooked up showing their concept of a Zune Phone with a giant receiver and running various different things like Windows Paint, DOS (or at least the command prompt) and Reversi on what looks like WM5. Yikes. While I might agree that the concept of a Zune phone is a little absurd in the first place, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it's quite that absurd.

"Now that we're pretty sure the Zune Phone is coming, what do we want to see in it? Well, even though Microsoft's been leaving a lot of features out of first-generation products—especially when compared to Apple's feature-rich phone—here's a list of stuff that we think the Zune Phone needs to have to beat the iPhone... Of course, we'll be lucky if we see even a quarter of these features implemented on the first Zune Phone, but if we had to design one, this is what we'd want to see."

The features in question include: a Touchscreen, Wi-Fi and 3G Synching, OSX Compatibility and and Open Application Interface to name a few. Personally, I think the 'Streaming media from MCE or Xbox 360' would be the killer app here and would likely sway many Zune owners to buy an Xbox and Xbox owners to buy a Zune. What features do you think are must-haves for the Zune Phone?

"Even if you are ready to pledge a lifetime commitment to the iPod as your only brand of portable music player or to the iPhone as your only cellphone once it is released, you may find that FairPlay copy protection will, sooner or later, cause you grief. You are always going to have to buy Apple stuff. Forever and ever. Because your iTunes will not play on anyone else’s hardware. Unlike Apple, Microsoft has been willing to license its copy-protection software to third-party hardware vendors. But copy protection is copy protection: a headache only for the law-abiding. Microsoft used to promote its PlaysForSure copy-protection standard, but there must have been some difficulty with the “for sure” because the company has dropped it in favor of an entirely new copy-protection standard for its new Zune player, which, incidentally, is incompatible with the old one."



Randall Stross at The New York Times has written a two-page article that attacks DRM - in particular, that of closed ecosystems such as the iPod/iPhone and Zune. Have a read through it and tell us whether you agree or disagree.

"iPhone is a widescreen iPod with touch controls that lets you enjoy all your content — including music, audiobooks, videos, TV shows, and movies — on a beautiful 3.5-inch widescreen display. It also lets you sync your content from the iTunes library on your PC or Mac. And then you can access it all with just the touch of a finger."



Summarizing the iPhone is no easy feat. There's a huge amount of information, pictures, and QuickTime demonstrations to digest, so I recommend you visit the iPhone page when you have a spare moment. But phone and data capabilities aside, the iPhone is an iPod and it has a new UI and new capabilities that make it unlike any iPod that has ever been released. Let's break it down. It handles music, pictures, and video. It supports large album art on a 3.5" Multi-Touch 320 x 480 display (which supports multi-finger gestures), Cover Flow browsing, automatic switching between portrait and landscape modes, and it has 4GB or 8GB built-in, along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. There are definitely features here that no longer make the Zune UI as unique as it once was, but there are also some features it's missing, which gives the Zune a slight edge. Whichever way you look at it, it's healthy competition, and it'll be interesting to see what both Apple and Microsoft can conjure in the months and years ahead.