Now on to the software: It’s like a reworked and rebranded Windows Media Player. When I move back up to campus I’ll give it a try. I haven’t been able to test the wireless, as I’m at home. I’m not usually a fan of the ear-bud type headphones, but these ones sound better than others I have where surrounding noises are far too noticeable. Settings are easy to configure, themes and wallpapers are pretty smart. I can easily see it out in the sunlight, and Texas sunlight is not very friendly to visibility on any kind of reflective surface. Album art looks very nice and images are displayed in landscape when appropriate. The UI is very fast, very easy to use without any learning, looks sleek, and is large and easy to read and watch with the face at a distance. It’s small while still feeling like I’m holding something with some substance. The size of the device is not overly large, and it’s not heavy. This experience has, I guess, disillusioned me about portable media players.įirst I will start with the Zune device: It’s great. The buttons and screen were small, capacity was small, and it has a number of odd behaviors(such as not reading ID3 tags properly and displaying Japanese characters instead, or freezing on disagreeable ID3 tags). My point of comparison for an mp3 player device, the only other mp3 player I’ve had, was a 256MB mpio device. The other counterargument is “microsoft is the devil”, and I don’t like stupid personal biases.Īdding to all of this that the entire reason I felt justified in making a purchase was a TigerDirect gift card(see other postings about that), and TigerDirect only had the earliest model of the Gen5 iPod(not the 5.5) and the Zune, with no Creative video alternative. The only reputable counterarguments were that it’s heavier, which I felt could be accounted for by the larger screen size, and that it’s not the “original” that the iPod is, which according to a recently resolved patent dispute apparently Apple is paying Creative $100 million for a patent violation they made with the video iPod so much for originality, and even so, being the original product or even one that others emulates doesn’t mean that other products have not improved on the concept. Also, the addition of Firmware updates meant that there can, and considering the chatter likely will, be feature additions. The iPod’s screen was smaller, no wireless. The Zune had the larger screen, and the gimmick of wireless. The main choices I had were between the Zune and iPod. I ruled out the Creative Zen Vision: M because of seeing it in a store frozen while apparently playing a U2 song. VirtualDub + Windows Media Encoder = works for Zune. When a friend bought a Video iPod, finding a free way for him to convert video to its very picky format specifications was difficult and very time-consuming. My primary interest in buying a media device was for video, so the larger screen was a must. First, I would like to go through my rationale in choosing the Zune over other alternatives.
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