The Zune HD: “Worth The Wait”
Aug 5th, 2009 | By James Lewin | Category: iPods & Portable Media Players 
We’re still skeptical about the prospects for the Microsoft Zune HD….but CNet’s Donald Bell recently geeked-out with a pair of the new Zune HDs and came away impressed:
I am tentatively reaffirming my faith in Microsoft. This thing was worth the wait, folks.
Mind you, it’s not going to crush the iPod Touch–a product that for all intents and purposes is more mobile computer than media player–but it’s safe to say that the Zune finally has the power to make good on the promise of delivering one of the richest music experiences on a portable device.
This isn’t the first positive take from a Zune HD sneak preview, but Apple and Microsoft tend to limit early sneak previews to analysts that they can expect good reviews from, not critical curmudgeons like me.
Previously, CNet analyst Matt Rosoff called the Zune HD solid, while Gizmodo called the Zune HD’s hardware “tight and beautiful.”
We’ll have to see this to believe it. As we said in our initial take on the Zune HD:
The Zune HD is two years behind Apple’s iPhone/iPod touch platform – and Microsoft has the liability of the Zune platform’s history. The one distinguishing feature, HD Radio, is a refinement of a feature that most people have shown zero interest in.
The Zune HD may be “tight and beautiful”, but Apple has sold over 200 million tight and beautiful iPods, while Microsoft’s best known for delivering the blocky & buggy brown Zune.
And while Microsoft is trying to steal Apple’s portable media player business, Apple has established a new portable computing platform with 65,000 apps.
The bottom line? Even if Microsoft executes the Zune HD perfectly, they’ll have to compete with Apple based on price.
Glad to be no.1. I like Zune HD ^-^
I gave up on C|Net as a credible news source.
They are just shills for Microsoft’s marketing department and have nothing worth reading concerning anybody who’s doing anything else.
IBM, Apple, Sun Microsystems, Sysco or any of the Linux distributors, it doesn’t make any difference to them.
If the sun didn’t rise in Redmond, C|Net is going to sh*t all over it.
When Microsoft finally wakes up and notices that people are doing things that wasn’t on Microsoft’s radar, like virtualization, or sees people doing things in other domains, like game consoles, like smart phones, like the iPod and other MP3 players, like the iTunes Music and App stores, then all of sudden, there’s a land rush of advertising and other NON-CREATIVE activity where Microsoft attempts to carve out a niche for itself and tries to use its fading monopoly on the desktop to muscle aside all of the others players.
The Zune is a dead duck mostly because of the very attitude of “winner take all” created and fostered by Microsoft itself…
You seem to be a bitter, bitter person. Kind of shoots your credibility all to pieces.