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Zune 80 GB Digital Media Player (Black) |
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| Gave it a shot but returned for Nano |
Long story short. The Zune 80 GB (Red) is feature rich but after purchasing and using one for two days I returned it and purchased 16 GB Nano (4th Gen) instead.
This is only my second MP3 player purchase. I am replacing a 4 GB iPod Mini that is still working reasonably well (but no color screen). I rip my own CDs so actually do not care if I use Zune Music management Software or iTunes. I find them both unintuitive.
It is possible the touchpad on my Zune was defective or I was just not using it right but I could not get the "clicking" down right. I would scroll to Music or Video and then "click" in the center but half the time I would end up scrolling up or down instead. Within the Music section I had trouble getting the left to right scrolling working all the time as well (playlist, songs, etc). One time after I held it down for about 10 seconds, its started scrolling like crazy and I had to turn off the Zune.
The radio and scanning the channels did not seem that user friendly. One of the reasons I chose the Zune was to get a radio (although not to identify music to purchase as Microsoft intends).
Video was nice but really I don't see much difference between 2" and 3.2" screens (same resolution). Guess video on the Touch would be more impressive than the Zune or Classic but after playing with some videos on the Zune and watching a James Bond flick my interest in thinking I'd watch lots of movies on the Zune dissipated a lot! Not because of the quality which was fine, just the screen size. I'll still watch some videos on the Nano.
I did quite a bit of research prior to picking the 80 GB Zune and my 3 top picks were the Zune, iPod Classic and new Touch (I looked at Archos, Cowon, Creative, Sansa, Sony, etc.). The Touch is not really a competitor to the first two, but of course its very different and cool. I think of its as a PDA though and many of its features are things I just don't care about/will probably end up with on my next cell phone anyway. My coworker just got a 8 GB Touch and is having trouble with the battery life (lots of posts on the support sites about this).
One of the reasons I chose the Zune 80 GB over the 120 GB was because the former comes with the "Premium" headphones, but I was not impressed. Bass was to low for me. Once I plugged in my foldable Sennheiser PX100 headphones, the bass picked right up though (or I probably would have returned the Zune just for that reason alone).
Anyway, I decided to get the 4th Generation Nano after thinking that I should stick to a Flash based unit this time around. I did hear the hard drive clicking a few times on the Zune which I never hear on my Mini. I run with my Mini but just on the treadmill where it sits in the cupholder. I only went with the 4th Gen Nano today because Apple put out a release to take care of the Cover Flow issue (because of the accelerometer). Otherwise I probably would have looked for a previous generation Nano. |
| Nov 16, 2008 |
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| My Wife Loves It!!! |
Bought the Zune for my wife for her birthday back in August. She burnned all of her CD's and now keeps them on her Zune. She loves having her music all in one place.
My only complaint is that there should he a setting to turn the headphone jack into a line level out. This would significantly improve the clarity of playback when using the headphone jack to provide input to a hoime stereo system. |
| Nov 07, 2008 |
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| Needs improvements |
Things that are great: audio, size, price, ease of use of hardware, picture, good randomized playlist feature, music store online, excellent battery life.
Things that are not so great: Screen cracks easily without provocation, software a pain to use, wireless sync still problematic
Things that are awful: No .avi or divx/xvid playability. This can supposedly be worked around through a registry hack, but I haven't gotten it to work. 80% of my videos are unwatchable on this. |
| Oct 31, 2008 |
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| zune is garbage |
| i loved my zune when i first got it. it was great till not even 2 months later it just stopped working. nothing happened to it, didnt fall or anything. i picked it up to listen to it and in was making this weird clicking nosie like the hard drive was messed up then the contact customer support screen came up and thats all it will do now. im switching to ipod. don't buy a zune there garbage. |
| Oct 20, 2008 |
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