I recently purchased a refurbished Microsoft Zune off of Woot.com. It’s the 30 gig, black model. They were selling them for about half of the brand new price, so it was a pretty good deal. I’ve been using it for awhile now, and I’ve decided to write a bit about my impressions of the Zune device itself and the Zune software.

The Good

I love the Zune. Ever since I got it, I’ve been falling more and more in love with it every day. Or something like that. Here are a few things in particular that I find particularly great about it.

1. The casing. At first glance, the casing seems a bit cheap. They really didn’t try at all to hide the seam lines between the front casing and the rear casing. I didn’t like it at first. However, after a few days of use, I noticed that the device really has a solid feel to it. The plastic feels like that really strong laptop plastic that the old IBM’s or business model Dells are made out of. The buttons feel solid too; there’s nothing flimsy about the Zune at all. It also has a matte finish that does not show fingerprints or smudges at all, unlike Apple’s iPod. I absolutely love this, because with the glossier finishes, fingerprints and smudges really show up, and you spend a good portion of your time rubbing the thing off on your shirt trying to buff it back to shininess. Not an issue with the Zune.

2. The screen. The screen is large and bright, and I have no trouble at all watching my podcasts on it. For a hand held device, the resolution is decent too.

3. Updates. Unlike Apple, Microsoft is not forcing you to buy a new mp3 player to get new features. Coinciding with the recent release of the new Zune2 was a firmware update for the original Zune 30. The update added the new interface as well as the new features from the Zune2. Two of the biggest feature additions were “Wireless Sync” and Podcasts (the original Zune software did not have an easy way to find/add podcasts.) Wireless Sync allows you to connect your Zune to your PC using WiFi. (No, it doesn’t work over the internet. Local area only for now.) This comes in handy for times when you are just too lazy to get up off the couch to plug in the USB, but you want that new episode of Ask a Ninja synced over.

4. Zune software works well. The software that comes with the Zune is decent. While it’s not going to make the avid computer user too happy with it’s lack of controls (ID3 tag editing in particular), it is great for the everyday user. Everything is laid out in a fairly logical position, and the interface looks good. The Zune Marketplace has plenty of music to choose from, as well as a decent directory of podcasts to subscribe to. Overall, I’d say Microsoft did a decent job on the most recent release.

5. The Zune interface. Using the Zune is easy. The text size on the screen is large enough to easily read from a distance. All of the options are where you would expect them to be, and the buttons do what you would expect them to do. It performs operations smoothly, and it doesn’t have the sluggish feeling of some other players.

The Bad

1. It could be thinner. The Zune does feel a bit bulky compared to a device like the iPod. The recently released Zune2, however, seems to be quite a bit thinner, so this is not an issue in the new Zune2.

2. No easy way to sync with Linux. For now there doesn’t seem to be a way to run the Zune software under Linux, even with WINE. In some of the forums I’ve read a few people have been using a Windows XP virtual machine to run the Zune software. However, this solution lacks elegance in my opinion. Why would I want to install a VM to run WINDOWS on my Linux computer? That’s not a solution, that’s just a lazy work around. Until someone comes out with a program to sync the Zune in Linux, I’m stuck with using my Vista box to do it.

3. No podcast support. This actually was fixed in the latest version of the Zune software/firmware. Now you can subscribe to podcasts just like with iTunes.

4. Cannot be used as portable storage. I don’t know what Microsoft was thinking. For some reason, the Zune does not show up as a removable disk unless you implement a small registry hack (who wants to do that on every computer they use?). It seems obvious that a person would want the ability to use the Zune as storage, considering it’s relatively small size and large 30 gig storage capacity, or 80 gigs on the new Zune2.

Conclusion

Overall, the Zune is a worthy mp3 player that actually may give the iPod some competition. The Zune 80 (2nd generation Zune) will give you 80gb of storage with a nice 3.2 inch screen, as well as a touch pad for navigation (similar to a track pad on a laptop). The iPod for the same price will give you the same storage, but only a 2.5 inch screen. Here’s a side-by-side of the Zune 80 and the iPod Classic.

Apple also has their new iPod Touch, but really there isn’t much of a comparison between an iPod Touch and a Zune. The Touch is more of a PDA, while the Zune is just an mp3 player.

I’ve heard a lot of talking about how the Zune was a disaster, but I’ve been using mine for a few weeks and I just l0ve it. IMHO, it looks nice, is designed well, and does exactly what I want it to. Good job Microsoft (for a change).

Earlier this year I purchased a Gateway laptop (Gateway MT3418) with Windows Vista on it. It was not long before I realized that my laptop was just not powerful enough to run an OS as bloated as Vista. Everything opened slow and ran slow, and the glitzy Aero window decorator simply was more than the laptop could handle. Aside from performance, Vista also was extremely buggy. Coming out of Hibernation and Sleep would cause my laptop to bluescreen. Copying files over the network from my desktop computer took forever, and the speed seemed to max out at 600Kb/s (over a 54mb connection). File operations like Copy and Move also took forever, and Vista often got stuck on “Calculating” during the process. It wasn’t long before I decided to do away with Vista.

Rather than purchase a copy of Windows XP, I decided to remove Vista and put a Linux distribution on my laptop (you can’t argue with the price…free!). I had tried several before, and I had the best experience with Ubuntu Linux. So I went and got the latest ISO, burned it to a CD, put it in my laptop, and booted up. The first thing I liked was that the install process was much better than anything I had experienced with Windows. When you boot from a Ubuntu install disk, it takes you straight to the desktop as though you had booted from a fresh installed of Ubuntu. From there, you can install Ubuntu to your hard drive. You can also, if you’re network card is detected correctly, surf the internet with Firefox WHILE the system is installing. That concept just about blew my mind. As for the installation process itself, it went very smoothly, and unlike Windows, there was no annoying license key to type in.

The install took about 10 minutes, after which I took the cd out and rebooted. After a fairly quick boot-up sequence, I was on my desktop. Everything looked pretty good. Ubuntu had chosen the correct video driver and screen resolution, which can occasionally be a problem with Linux distributions. The default installation had just about everything I would need to get going. There was a full office suite (OpenOffice), the Firefox web browser, Evolution email (similar to MS Outlook), and quite a few other applications that you would expect to find in a desktop operating system.

There were two major problems, however, that I noticed right away. First off, I had no sound. It took a little bit of research to discover that the sound chipset that my laptop used was not supported yet. However, after about three days of searching on Google, I found a patch for ALSA that had been posted on a bug report that fixed the issue.  (EDIT:  The card is now supported in the current release of ALSA.) Second, my wireless connection was not working. Ubuntu did not have drivers for the wireless card, which was a “RealTek 8185 Extensible Wireless Device”. I had heard about a program called NdisWrapper that would allow one to use Windows XP drivers for Linux. In my case, all I had was Windows Vista drivers, which supposedly were not supported yet. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying, so I installed NdisWrapper and used the RealTek drivers from Vista. Wondrously, it worked! So, after a few days of tinkering around, I had a fully functional laptop running Ubuntu Linux. (Well, there is one more problem, but it’s rather minor. More on that later.)

Given the fact that it took me three days to actually get some of the more important devices on my laptop to work, I could easily see how a more novice computer user could get frustrated rather quickly with a Linux installation, especially on a machine with newer hardware. A lot of the older and more popular hardware works well, but the support for newer and less widespread hardware is not. This isn’t necessarily a problem with Ubuntu or the open source community that codes for it, so much as it is a problem that hardware vendors do not (yet) see the need to make drivers for an operating system that has a limited user base. Of course, this creates a catch 22 of sorts. Hardware manufactures don’t create drivers for Ubuntu/Linux due to the small number of users, and Ubuntu has difficulty drawing new users due to lack of hardware support.

Back to my Ubuntu experience. After getting everything working properly, I turned to one of the more unique aspects of Ubuntu: user interface customization. When it comes to being able to customize the look and feel of your computer, Ubuntu (and Linux and general) is king. The Mac OS and Microsoft Windows simply cannot compare. Quite literally, any aspect of your desktop can be modified and customized in Ubuntu. Also, the look and feel of windows, buttons and menus can be changed as well. Also, there have been some advances with “3D Desktops” and Desktop Effects in Ubuntu, mainly through programs called “Compiz” and “Beryl”. For a sample of what these two programs can do, see this video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_ImW0-MgR8I

I was blow away the first time I tried Beryl on my laptop. It was simply amazing the amount of animation and effects that my machine was rendering without any sort or slowdown or lag. It was even more amazing, because the Aero effects in Windows Vista had brought my laptop to it’s knees. Which was rather sad, because all that Aero did was add transparency to title bars and drop shadows behind windows and menus…nothing that should have taken a lot of processing power. Ubuntu with Beryl accomplished this and much more.

If I get the time later, I may post some screen shots.