My first Zune experience

JeremyKelley — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 06:27:00 GMT

I'm going to take a little diversion from my normal Power Toy goodness to blog about Zune. Yeah I know, bandwagon, sellout, blah blah. My blog, my post. :)

So I bought a Zune today, went out to Sears after work, and got the black one. I tried to get one at Target this morning but they only had white left. And let's face it, I didn't want something that was so easily confused with that OTHER MP3 player. So black it is (brown sold out!)

I've been reading reports all day about how awful the Zune install experience is. And it sucks that we couldn't make software that works bullet proof on all systems. I must have been one of the lucky ones. I had no real problems with it. Although when I put my machine in sleep mode to go eat dinner, the setup program froze and I had to restart the PC. NOT GOOD! But on the second try it worked awesome. VERY GOOD! The process from first "Next" to the required reboot took about 6 minutes. I did see the software installing on another machine earlier today take much longer, but here it worked very quickly.

After the reboot, the software had me plug the Zune in and download and install a firmware update. Again, it worked quickly and flawlessly.

One thing I noticed that I haven't seen mentioned before, the Zune sign up screens are shown while the device syncs with your library. So if you have a library already set up and it's going to take a long time to sync, the sign up process doesn't seem so bad. Since I, a) have no library setup yet, and b) took forever to figure out a Zune tag name, this didn't help me much. But even then, it wasn't so bad.

I'm really liking the Zune music store. There are lots of little things, like the fact that they have Inspiral Carpets available. :) I thought I was doomed to scouring bargain bins for them.

Overall, I know there are things I want added to the device, but they're all software, and if there's one thing we can improve quickly it's our software. Zune is a go for me, of course I don't own another MP3 player so your mileage may vary.

The JPK Experience : Zune

My first Zune experience