One of my all-time tech journalism heroes, Walt Mossberg, gave his take on the MS Zune last Thursday. After spending a couple of weeks with it, he comes to the conclusion that, while it has some cool features, and bests the iPod in a few areas, he’s not sold on this first version.
It’s interesting that Mossberg liked and disliked most everything that I do, and I haven’t even seen a unit in person yet. Many of the things I’ve seen and felt from a distance appear to only get stronger up close. For instance, he likes the user interface and found it more attractive than Apple’s and in many ways easier to navigate. In looking at online demos, I’m really attracted to the UI as well. And people are making a big deal about it having a faux wheel (it just looks like a scroll wheel, it’s actually a four-way switch), but honestly, I don’t like the wheel on the iPod. Walt says that in many instances, it was quicker and easier to navigate the menus than on an iPod. Some of the drawbacks he found included the clunky design (as he says, it looks like a blocked-out prototype, not a final product), poor battery life (a big drawback in my book), lesser quality display than on the iPod (while the screen is bigger, it renders at the same resolution, so images appear grainier). And as I’ve been suspecting, all that “Welcome to Social” jazz (who the hell came up with THAT tortured tagline?) and the temporary song sharing appears to be a feature that sounded good at an R&D brainstorm but is unlikely something that’s going to catch on in a significant way. Mossberg had problems with the sharing and thinks it’s downright ANTI-social that the Zune desktop software doesn’t allow network sharing of music libraries like iTunes does (when my son Blake comes home from college and his PC laptop joins the LAN, I love to check out what he’s listening to and he does the same with the library on my Mac. It’s a great way for us to turn each other on to new music). And the Zune store has a goofy points system where you need to buy at least $5 worth of points to start downloading tracks.
After seeing some of the hands-on demos that have been cropping up in the last few days, I was starting to think that the Zune might be cooler than I’d thought (I DO like the look and feel of the UI and the four-way button), but overall, I think that Gen1 may prove to be more of an annoying insurgence and less of a full-fledged overthrow of the iPod. But one can imagine a serious threat within a few years.
