by ccdoggy

Pros: Great player, battery lasts and lasts, very good screen for price, Wireless sync, FM
Cons: The software just plain sucks.

The Zune is a great player especially for the price, The software sucks.

all around its a great mobile music player. The battery lasts like 8-9 hours if im listening to music (cant be changing songs as the screen kills the battery) and maybe an hour or two if watching videos. It is a great device for podcasts, I have it loaded with 10 podcasts I regularly watch, it keeps everything organized and easy to find.

One of the coolest/best features is that with the newest update it can connect to you're wireless network and sync with your computer. So if you leave it in the car plugged into the charger you could just hit the sync button and let it go. in the morning all your stuff would be ready to go for the commute. Just be careful as it uses allot of power so I wouldent suggest it if you are transferring any larger files. I use it to sync a play list for the day.

Syncing videos can take a long time depending on what format they are in. If its anything other then wmv they will need to be re-encodded and then transfered to the zune. which is another thing to slow the computer down. but must be done to watch stuff. Most podcasts have one that is already formatted correctly so theres no worry there. Watching videos is not too bad, its no flat screen tv but its doable for TV shows and the like.

Version 1 of the Zune software was just a modded windows media player 11. Then the software development team thought it would be better to start from scratch on the software and do it up right. well thats a good idea except for the fact that when they did it they dropped a whole lot of very useful features, made the program a cpu and ram hog, and made it all around slow.

I would NOT buy another zune unless they fix the software. I suppose it would be fine for someone that has a small amount of music and or wants to use the zune pass (which is pretty awesome i have to say). Maybe the slow program is due to the amount of music i have (4000+ songs). You are forced into using the software, they have locked the zune down pretty good to stop you from using anything else.

The software is pretty, it is user friendly if you are not a power-user, and could be worse. But it almost feels like the zune team is not moving fast enough to get the fixes out.

They are slowly making progress on the software updates (1 every like 3 months). They fix a few problems here and there but it just rns slow, does not take external playlists, takes forever to change area (music, movies, playlists, podcasts). Maybe my computer is too slow, (4 years old) but i doubt it.

Alla round the player is awesome, but alas its achilles heel is the software.