Product Spotlight: Microsoft Zune (second generation) Video

Product Spotlight: Microsoft Zune (second generation) Video Transcript

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>> You might have snickered at Microsoft's first entry into the MP3 world. But the second generation Zune has become a worthy iPod alternative. I'm Brian Tong for CNET.com, and the product spotlight is fixed and focused on the latest Microsoft Zune. ^M00:00:14 [ music ] ^M00:00:21 Microsoft's first Zune player wasn't on the top of everybody's got to have list, even though it had some pretty innovative features. So Microsoft learned from their first try, and the second gen Zune has definitely stepped things up. Now the first thing you'll notice is the Zune is a whole lot slimmer, compared to the brick it used to be. It's pocket friendly at half an inch thick, but even better the capacity has been bumped up from thirty gigabytes to almost three times that amount, to eighty gigabytes now. Another hardware improvement is the screen. It has a 3.2 inch screen that's slightly larger than the original, and superior in size compared to the iPod classic. But instead of plastic, it's optical glass, and that means a more scratch resistant surface. Now a new innovation to the Zune is what Microsoft calls the Zune pad. And you can see it here. It's basically a cross breed between a standard four direction navigation pad, and the touchpad on a laptop. Now it takes a little time to get the feel, but it works really well moving through the menus, and skipping through songs and photos. The interface is a whole lot bigger and bolder, and you shouldn't have any problem reading it. I mean my grandma was even able to read it, seriously. And you can change the background to a pic of your choice. Feature wise the original Zune had a lot packed in at the time, subscription music support, widescreen video playback, Wi-Fi music sharing, composite video out, and RBDS enabled FM radio, which stands for the radio broadcast data system. Now depending on the broadcaster, the Zune's FM radio displays call letters, genre, artist and song info, and it's radio done right on a media player. I love this feature. So all those features remain, and there's some new ones too. First up, you can now get your favorite TV shows from the Zune marketplace for about two dollars a pop. Networks like NBC, and the Sci Fi channel are on board, so iTunes fans might have a little envy there. We also have podcasts. Yes, the Zune can now do audio and video podcasts. And the integration of ease of use with the Zune PC software is a really nice addition. Another big time feature is wireless syncing. So with the Zune you can wireless sync content from your PC over your home Wi-Fi network. Take that iPod. It automatically syncs when it's plugged in for a recharge, or you can do it manually through the Zune settings. You can still sync it through the USB cable, but how sweet is wirelessly syncing. Now Microsoft recently announced their new XNA game studio platform, and we wouldn't be surprised to see Zune gaming in the near future. So stay tuned for that. So let's talk about where it needs some work, cause there's that iPod thing, yeah. It's still dominating the market. So the Zune is a PC only device, requires its own Zune PC software, and sure PC's make up most of the market, but it's still limiting. Another huge drawback is the content available. Now the Zune has this great size screen, but at the moment there are no TV or movie downloads available. The iPod has content galore, so it's a big miss there. And they've always touted their Zune sharing feature, but I tried finding someone to share music with the past couple of days, and I had no such luck. It's really a cool idea, but you can't really use it. And there are a lot of Wi-Fi features packed in the Zune, but it comes at a price. Performance. Wi-Fi just takes up a whole lot of juice, and Microsoft touts the Zune is good for thirty hours of audio. Well our labs tested it out, and it gave us twenty two hours with the Wi-Fi turned off. So it's even less if you turn the Wi-Fi on, compared to the Apple's classic iPod, which gave us forty five hours of audio only playback. So there's a huge difference there. Now we've gone through a whole bunch of things, but at the end of the day the second generation Zune makes some great improvements to the Zune product line. I'm Brian Tong for CNET.com, and finally our CNET crew believes the Zune is a worthy alternative to the iPod. ^M00:03:56 [ music ]