Shock: Zune doesn’t work with Vista, but buyers like the screen

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 15 November 2006 18:42

Your IT - Entertainment

ZDnet reports on Virgin Megastore having the stock but not being able to sell any because the Zune display stand doesn’t fit into the shelving space, requiring a new stand to be delivered later this week before the Zunes go on sale. Then there’s while the CompUSA store just hadn’t received their allocation yet but were assured it was on the way real soon now, and in a bit of an oops to compound the issue, 15 people turned up expecting to be able to buy one but were turned away. Oops.

One store that did have stock, Best Buy, actually reported 10 sales, some possibly as corporate gifits, but this is far from huge lines stretching around the block that we saw in the Japanese PS3 launch, or the ones we’ll see when the PS3 launches in the US in 2 days on Friday the 17.

Some of those that purchased mostly bought it thanks to its larger size screen, although as many have pointed out, it displays the same resolution as the iPod so reports say that album art actually looks a little grainer instead of sharper.

Still, a bigger screen is always a good thing, but if Apple really is releasing that almost mythical widescreen wireless iPod with Bluetooth, touchscreen, built-in kitchen sink and coffee maker does arrive at Macworld in the first week of January, the Zune’s 3-inch screen won’t seem so big any more.

It’s certainly bested by the PSP’s gloriously large widescreen, and even companies such as Archos, who’ve long made an excellent range of media players, have released the Archos 604 WiFi, a 4.3-inch, 16 million colour touchscreen Wi-Fi media player only in the last couple of weeks which has much better specs than the iPod and Zune put together.

But because it doesn’t say Apple or Microsoft on it, the global news has been much quieter.

Clearly, if the Zune was from one of the existing Windows compatible digital media players, no-one would particularly care. The Zune is bigger and clunkier than the iPod, but as Microsoft is doing it, well, at least it is getting global publicity, if not huge sales as yet.

After all, the Zune is officially only a day old, and Microsoft has publicly stated that they’re in this form the long term, just as they are with the Xbox. The first Zune is version 1 after all, and there are plenty of Microsoft products we can all remember as version 1’s that, well, no-one uses any more, as upgrades have (generally but obviously not always) come relatively thick and fast.

Zune 2 and Scooby-Doo, where are you? Being perfected in the labs no doubt, but as for Scooby-Doo, we’ve no idea. The Zune will improve, of that there’s no doubt. Microsoft must have bigger widescreen Zunes in the labs, with all kinds of nifty features to counter any Apple threat.

And there’s a rumoured PSP update for 2007 to contend with too, with a built-in hard drive, possible GPS, high quality digital camera which can record video too... and those multifunction mobile smart phones that the Zune, iPod and the PSP need to contend with, too more.

At last, media players are rapidly evolving into amazing multi-function devices almost akin to a digital swiss army knife. For too long most have just been ‘iPod clones’ with a few extra features thrown in. Zune is just more of the same generation technology, but the next-generation personal, portable digital media players is just around the corner, and with the release of the Archos 604, pointing the direction to Apple's as-yet unreleased true 6th-generation widescreen wireless iPod, is perhaps already here.

One final thing: why is it that currently huge money-sinks of projects like Zune and the Xbox 360 can come out on time, with even the Xbox 360 launching the high-definition gaming race by more than year over its competitors, whereas the products that are Microsoft’s bread and butter and make all of their profits, like Windows and Office, have come out late? The only crossover between these two threads is that Zune came out on time for Windows XP, but Zune compatibility is late for Vista.

Like one of those mysterious laws of the universe, it looks like the pattern still holds!