Zune

This whole Zune thing is just a train wreck. Granted, the only reason I know anything about the Zune is that I read a fair number of Apple-related publications, many of which have been taking potshots at the Zune for months now. But now that the thing is in stores, I’m seeing enough reviews from less biased sources to draw some conclusions.

Let’s review:

1. Installation crashes a lot, and to purchase something from the store, you have to re-enter all the personal info you just entered during setup.

2. The install screen features hot girl-on-girl action. (No, really.)

3. You can’t install at all on Vista—which, OK, the OS isn’t out yet. But it will be two weeks from now. When exactly are they planning on making the Zune work with it?

Note, please, the quote from Ballmer (presumably on the Zune’s wireless features): “I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That’s [an] experience.” Let me be up front about this: I don’t want to “experience” anything from Steve Ballmer, much less anything transferred in a manner that can be characterized as “squirting.”

4. In order to buy music from the store, you have to buy blocks of Zune Points.

There isn’t a 1 to 1 correspondence between the value of a “point” and the value of a penny. [...] So, let me explain why this is important. If Microsoft prices a song at 79 “Zune Points” is it cheaper than a 99 cent song from Apple? I don’t know, lets do the math.

79 points * (1.25 cents/1 point) = 98.75 cents (or approximately 99 cents)

So the answer is “no, the MS song isn’t cheaper, it is the same price as Apple’s”. So, that means, to find the actual price of anything on the Zune store you have to multiply it in your head by a ZP (Zune Point) factor of 1.25, and since the general populace isn’t to keen on doing math in their head I can only conclude that this will cause no small bit of confusion. But wait, it gets better.

If you recall $5 is the lowest denomination you can purchase. So if you want to buy one song from the Zune Marketplace you have pay Microsoft $5 up front and let them keep your remaining 321 points (or $4.01, this is beginning to get confusing).

5. The device doesn’t photograph well, which is fine unless you’re, y’know, buying the thing online. Gosh, why would anyone who wants to purchase their music from a web store consider purchasing a device online as well?

6. ”...music exchanged among Zunes will cease to play after three days or after it’s been played three times. This includes music, podcasts, and other files that are specifically licensed for unlimited reproduction or trading…”

More commentary on this feature bug:

What’s really nuts is that the restrictions even stomp on your own musical creations. Microsoft’s literature suggests that if you have a struggling rock band, you could “put your demo recordings on your Zune” and “when you’re out in public, you can send the songs to your friends.” What it doesn’t say: “And then three days later, just when buzz about your band is beginning to build, your songs disappear from everyone’s Zunes, making you look like an idiot.”

and a bit more:

I suppose this opens a philosophical debate on when in a song’s playing does the it turn into the past tense ‘played’? For iTunes the question was any easy one: it’s played when it’s done playing. But Microsoft had to put the playcount at the beginning of the song. Why? Because if it were at the end, then I could listen to a whole song nearly to the end, and then skip to the next song, thus finding an easy workaround to the “3 plays or 3 days” limitation. Never mind that the song will be erased in 3 days anyway…

I could go on, but Daring Fireball has done it for me at this point.

Update: Five minutes after posting that, I found this gem: Microsoft to reward Zune song sharing.

From the comments at digg: “Won’t it be great to get spammed by all the Zune owners trying to spread around songs solely for the kickback. Microsoft has successfully brought spam to the MP3 player.”

(Originally published at sillybean. Please leave any comments there.)