So the holidays are over and the Zune hasn't really made much of a dent. Having had a play with the device, I can see why this is. It's not actually bad, it's just not great. It doesn't do much that any other player doesn't already do, and what it does new immediately feels like it misses the mark.
Here's what I assumed they were going for and, in contrast, why I'm not interested yet.
Wifi access to the store from the device. No brainer really. Can't for the life of me see why they didn't wait until this was a go.
Intuitive media sharing. The current sharing interface on the Zune is awful. Never mind the policy, the actual act of sharing its self is limp. I envisioned something that worked like a very local radio station, with Zunes able to tune into each other and see/hear what the master is doing. To the lay person it would make more sense to tune into things like this, and then initiate a local copy request that can jump through the DRM hoops or just bookmark a purchase for later.
Not to mention that the act of being able to broadcast to a small audience like that would be a killer app, and much more in tune with the viral marketing function that music sharing has. Plus, it's actually even more rights friendly: you can only listen freely while the other Zune is nearby, and you have no control over the playback. Adding their 3 or 3 sharing on top of that would be golden. I could see a future in which such sharing was so ubiquitous that indie bands would practically have to be able to "zunecast" to get anywhere.
With that logic in place, I wanted to see intelligent systems that you could preconfigure to tune into your particular Zune automatically. When I get home from the morning run, I'd like my PC to pick up on the device and pump the music I'm listening to out its speakers. Fancy hifi wireless headphones would do the same when I get to work, heck so would my car and the phone headset, if asked to. Little standalone speaker setups I could dump around the house would be neato as well.
It'd also be a more natural way to share photos. Scrolling through your slide show, narrating while other people look at their Zunes seems logical to me, with your audience able to pick and choose what they might like to archive for later viewing.
Tagging these shares with additional metadata would be icing on the cake. Indie bands would have links to their webpages and latest blog excerpts travel with their songs, which media player would happily load for its now playing screen. Notes for pictures would explain them, and carry a link to a flikr collection for the full set. Viral funny video marketing efforts on the net would carry coupons that you could redeem by having the video present on your Zune when you walked into a store.
But no. What we actually got was a big fat media player with a so so battery life and what amounts to little more than gimped local ftp. Bizarrely, despite its features, this leaves it ill suited to displace the current Creative Zen V I carry around: it's small, robust, completely non intrusive and plays everything under the sun. Sorry Microsoft, maybe at version 2?
A bit of online coverage as background for the above post.
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