Zune Review

So tonight I decided to try to copy a gig of new music to my zune.  It should be a big deal right?  Well it was.  First of all I connected it through a USB hub.  Big mistake.  It kept disconnecting/reconnecting contently.  Its 100% not the hub though.  I connect terabyte had drives, game controllers and other devices no problem.  Next I tried an extension cable which did the same thing as the hub.  Finally I got on my knees and plugged the damn thing in.  After that, the zune software launched and it started to sync despite the fact there was no space.  I told it to stop and it did; only to resume when I went to another page.  I finally managed to stop it, navigated to what I thought were some useless files to delete and right clicked and selected delete.  It said deleting song.  So I went downstairs, cooked some hotdogs, made a drink, came upstairs and it was still deleting the same goddamn song.  I give up.  It has went from clunky to virtually unusable.  One of these days I am going to go office space on the ****ing thing.  But before that I’m going to give them some negative press.

Review on Newegg:

Pros:

You can choose your own background.  It works with all headphones.  The headphones it comes with are amazing.

Cons:

I could write a 200 page book about everything you can’t do with this MP3 player, solely because M$ doesn’t want you to.  You can’t organize your music collection the way you want.  It takes hours to delete a song, if you can even find the song through its horrid software.  It syncs on its own regardless of if you tell it not to and regardless of whether or not its full.  If it is full, it doesn’t tell which files fail to sync.  It is incredibly difficult to turn off, or to confirm its off and not in. You can’t connect it to the computer through a USB hub.  THE UNIT DOES NOT COME WITH A WALL CHARGER! While it does work with the Xbox 360 (and no other device), it takes about 10X longer to start playing a song than a networked computer two floors down over wifi.  The sync cable is way too short and you can’t use USB extension cables.  The interface is clunky, and the control pad is hard to use, especially in the dark or when you aren’t looking.  I could go on forever but I’m out of space

Other thoughts:

Do yourself a favor and buy yourself the cheapest offbrand  MP3 player you can find.  Not only do those actually work, you can organize organize your music the way you want, not the M$ wants.  And most of them (unlike the zune) work as portable hard drives and some are even bootable.  It is unbelievable that M$ charges as much for these as an Ipod, and even more unbelievable that people are actually satisfied with their purchase!

The sad thing is, it is good hardware.  It has plenty of storage space, built in wifi (that does nothing in practice) and a decent screen.  Maybe someday M$ will hire somebody with more than a third grade education to program the interface and software for it.  Or let hackers port rockbox to it.  Until then, AVOID THIS LIKE THE DRM INFECTED OVERPRICED PIECE OF **** IT IS!!!!

~ by krakenx on June 17, 2008.