New Zune HD - Can it Compete with the iPOD?
Zune HD - A place at custom's table at last?
From an A/V and UI standpoint, Microsoft's new Zune HD could be a real heavy hitter in the portable medial player arena. I mean, how many PMPs use a honest to goodness Woflson DAC, for God's sake? The UI is pretty amazing too, perhaps even better than the iPOD/ iPHONE's. And HD Radio? You could dock this thing to your A/V system to take advantage of the high end DAC or you could stream your music via bluetooth to your audio system.
You've gotta love the new interface and the OLED touch screen:
For those in the CEDIA crowd, the question is naturally one of industry support. Will there ever be anything near the level of 3rd party support that the iPOD enjoys? Probably not, but the ability to display metadata from thw Zune HD on a remote or touch screen control while the player sits in a docking station, charging happily, would be a welcome development.
It looks like Microsoft is going to allow 3rd party apps for the Zune HD, so can a real CI interface and docking station be far behind? It will probably depend on a great extent on how many of the little devils they can sell over the next 6 months or so. Microsoft already has an HDMI docking station with 720p video output that eclipes the piddly component video docking stations we've been making due with for the iPOD.
If they make the development environment easy and open enough, maybe we'll see the control apps pop up for the Zune HD, much as Crestron, Speakercraft, Lutron, and others have done with the iPhone / iPOD touch.
Quality wise, it seems that the Wolfson DAC, HD video capability, and HDMI docking station would make the Zune HD the player of choice for the CI crowd, if only the marketplace and equipment manufacturers would get behind it. The ability to use the Zune marketplace to easily down load AV content would be the icing on the cake for anyone who didn't want to go through all the hassle of synching their house music system player or server to iTUNES. After all, there are some people who don't use Apple's iTunes, and of those that do, many do it on a PC and would like something different.
In addition, theZune marketplace, coupled with the Zune HD's awesome interface, give you the ability to easily explore new music. Not only is it easier to explore new music than with the iPOD/iPHONE, but since you're only paying a monthly flat fee, you don't have to worry about racking up huge iTUNES bills in the process. If you download over 15 songs a month with iTUNES, switching to the Zune marketplace will save you plenty of dough. The downside, of course, is that should you ever decide to cancel your Zune marketplace subscrition, your music collection will be history.
The quality and interactivity of HD radio would be just the ticket for the custom crowd as well. Better quality, real metadata and interactivity would be a great fit, especially for those who live in areas with poor traditional radio reception and a wealth of HD radio choices.
If they really want to play though, at some point Microsoft will have to step up and add some capacity to the Zune HD. 32G is just not enough, especially for a device that holds HD video content. Hey MS, could you turn it into a phone too? Maybe their Pink project will answer those prayers.
