Exclusive Microsoft Zune Details

After lots of quality time groping the Zune like blind man on his wedding night, our people give us the lowdown on the player's functionality. Get the scoop after the jump!

First off, that scroll wheel you see? That's not a wheel. It's just four buttons arranged in a wheel formation. That kinda sucks if you're used to the scroll wheel, but it seems their engineers weren't too fond of it, or Microsoft didn't want to be accused of copying the iPod's wheel. Either way, it's just four buttons.

But like the wheel, the scrolling speeds up the longer you hold down the button. When you're scrolling through songs, there's a large letter that appears in the corner corresponding to the letter of the current song when you're running through your list. It's very similar to the way Windows Media Center works when you're scrolling, if you're familiar with that interface. In fact, the whole interface is quite like MCE 2005, with the semi-transparent fonts and GUI design.

On the back, there's a grip so you can hold the player when you're watching video in landscape mode. There's also some kind of magnetic feature on the back so you can attach the headphones to it. The magnets could be used for some sort of docking or case design—they're still working on that. The bottom has that iPod-like dock connector, while the case itself is plastic and semi-transparent.

The UI itself has white text on colored backgrounds, with lots of textures. This could even be skinnable. While the song is playing, it will display album art or a Windows Media Player-like visualization.

FM support is fairly complete, with both an FM tuner and an FM transmitter so you can beam the music to your car. The FM transmitter also feeds up Song and Artist information so you can see what's playing from your car stereo (if it supports that feature, like in GM cars). Pretty neat.
Two menu options that were disabled were the WiFi, and Capture Settings. We're not sure what the Capture Settings means—maybe recording FM?
—but we'll let you know. – Jason Chen

Zune Looks Ugly and Plain: It’s No iPod Killer

The long rumored “iPod-Killer” from Microsoft, due to make its debut on the market by this year’s end, has now entered a phase where more and more details are being revealed. Unfortunately, those details are (for the moment at least) quite disappointing.

Gadgets-oriented site Gizmodo has shown the world one of the first (unofficial) pictures of the future MP3 player built at Redmond. In my humble opinion, if that is how the famous iPod killer will look like, it has no chance of bringing anything else to Microsoft than ironies and huge holes in revenues.

Surprisingly or not, it features the same design as presented previously on the Web, with apparently a bigger screen than the current iPod’s and an overall size close to Apple’s product.

It’s far from being revolutionary with that placement of four buttons in the shape of a wheel, buttons that seem to actually serve the purpose of not attracting patent-infringement law suits rather than attracting users.

Apparently, Microsoft is trying to use the experience gained with Windows Media Center, and made the screen superimpose the current alphabet letter over the right side of the song list to let you know quickly how far you’ve moved to reach your favorite song.

They have also implemented a scrolling that speeds up when you hold down one of the buttons.
If you plan to upload your photos on Zune, you’ll probably be able to see them at a higher resolution and quality than on an iPod (thanks to the bigger screen), but this is not so impressive.

It also features an integrated FM radio, which eventually every MP3 player on the market has, so nothing astonishing here either. The FM transmitter also feeds up Song and Artist information so you can see what's playing from your car stereo (if it supports that feature, like in GM cars).

The UI itself has white text on colored backgrounds, with lots of textures. This could even be skinnable. While the song is playing, it will display album art or a Windows Media Player-like visualization.

Microsoft also hopes to attract users with is the possibility to share songs with those detaining the same Redmond-built device, using the wireless capabilities. You like a song, mark it for download and the rest is done by the MP3 player (aka the iPod killer).

You may also be able to spool Zune music to a Wi-Fi-enabled Xbox 360, which is a sort of a cool idea, but requires an additional $100 wireless adapter and the $300-400 console.

All in all, with the scarce details we have at our disposition, Zune is definitely not an iPod killer. You can call it a SanDisk killer, a Creative killer or a Sony killer. But no iPod killer here, no sir.
And by the way, NPD Group has recently indicated that iPod managed to overcome its rivals with astounding results: 75.6% market share in the US, more than 8 times more than its second-in-line competitor…