Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

I suppose it’s impossible to talk about Microsoft’s latest personal media player, the Zune HD ($229 at Amazon.com), without first talking Apple. I’ve been an iPod user for around 10 years now; I bought an iPod 3G back in April 2003 and never considered another music player until the iPod Touch was released in September 2007. The players were easy to operate, the sound quality from the iTunes Store was decent, and (for me, anyway) everything just worked.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago when the iPod Touch (3G) and iTunes 9 were released. I sat down and started researching some possible upgrades to my first generation iPod Touch, now pretty much filled to the brim with pictures and music. 16GB wasn’t going to cut it. iTunes, which I used for music management ever since it became available on Windows, seemed to be getting more and more bloated every time the version number went up. I had heard of Microsoft’s Zune line before, but everything I had read pointed to a lukewarm response from the general public. I have never met another Zune user, but I see iPods of all sorts every day.

Just before I was about to grab another iPod Touch, I started reading about a new generation of Microsoft’s Zune player, the Zune HD. 32GB of capacity? Plays my existing music? OLED screen? HD Radio (something I’ve always wanted to try listening to)? The feature list read like something out of a media player dream. I said to myself “Kyle, you never know until you try.” A quick trip to Amazon.com and a day later, I had one in my hands.

Hardware and Build Quality

In a word: fantastic. The Zune HD’s body is made of aluminum (the back is brushed so scratches won’t show as easily) and the capacitive touch organic LED screen is made of optical-grade glass (hard to scratch). As far as weight goes, the Zune HD is surprisingly light (2.6oz), especially in comparison to the iPod Touch 1G (4.05oz). The quality of the construction keeps the unit feeling solid in spite of its light weight.

As far as buttons go, there aren’t many. A thin horizontal button on the face of the Zune HD acts as a “Back/Home” button, the one of the left hand side pulls up a playback and volume overlay, and the power button sits on top. I’m eagerly awaiting the day where manufacturers of touch based media players realize that many of us would appreciate hardware volume controls.

The screen is a 3.3 inch 480×272 affair (that’s a 16:9 aspect ratio) with capacitive touch. Despite having a lower resolution display than the Touch (which runs at 480×320), the Zune HD’s aspect ratio matches that of most HD content, so you can watch video without those telltale black bars running across the top and bottom of the screen. The real benefit to the Zune’s screen is that it’s an Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) display. That means each pixel emits its own light (no backlight required). This allows for much deeper blacks and vivid colors. It’s really quite amazing to look at, especially in comparison to screens I thought looked “great” beforehand. The Zune’s OLED screen also improves its battery life, which Microsoft rates at 33 hours (music) and 8.5 hours (video). In my admittedly limited experience in draining the Zune’s battery, that estimation is pretty accurate!

I’m not much of an audio professional, but the Zune HD’s sound quality is on par with my old iPod Touch’s when listened to on my Astro A40 headphones.

Software and User Experience

The Zune’s home screen takes a cue from Windows Mobile 6.5, albeit with super-responsive hardware (thanks to the NVIDIA Tegra SoC). The right half of the screen acts as your top-level navigation. There are links for your music, video, and photo libraries, the HD Radio tuner, the on-device Zune Marketplace (much like the iTunes Store on the iPods), your Friends list (shared with your Xbox 360), podcasts, a decent web browser, apps (more on those in a bit), and finally settings.

The right side shows your recent history (what you’ve been playing), pinned (sticky) content, and the latest content to make its way on to your Zune. You can tap the Back/Home button on the home screen to swap between sides or just tap the side you want to view.

Before I forget and dive into all of the things I like about the Zune’s interface, I wanted to mention two parts of the UI that I’m not thrilled with: jumping to alphabetical listings and (this may be a dealbreaker for some), the decision to “hide” common playback controls like volume, play/pause, and skip behind a hardware button. To start, here’s how the Zune handles alphabetical navigation:

I think I prefer the ‘alphabetical strip’ that you see on Windows Mobile phones and the iPod line. There’s something about a cluster of letters that isn’t as intuitive. As for the playback controls:

The default playback view is pretty shiny from a graphical perspective. The background is a photo of the current artist/band. then the band name, album name, and album cover are displayed. The current song and (in the tiny font) upcoming tracks come after that. The three bottom buttons from left to right are toggle shuffle mode, loop, and like/don’t like (used to tweak the shuffle algorithm). If you notice something missing, you’re not alone. Where are the volume and playback controls? Well, if you tap the screen or press the button on the left side of the device you’ll see this pop up:

Behold, our missing skip, volume, and play/pause controls! As it turns out, you can skip forward and backwards by swiping the album cover on the playback screen, so I’m not as bothered by Microsoft’s decision to hide the playback controls as I was initially. The lack of hardware volume controls or a volume slider on the playback screen is still annoying though.

I really like the album browser. You get each artist’s albums ordered chronologically, complete with artwork. A small (barely legible) chunk of text under each title shows you the songs in the album. Tapping on a cover starts playback. What’s really nice about this view though it its integration with the Zune Marketplace. If you have WiFi turned on and scroll down to the bottom of your collection of albums for a particular artist, there’s a collapsible section called Marketplace Discography. Expanding that section shows you all of the albums available for that artist (including, annoyingly, ones that aren’t for sale on the Marketplace). If you have a Zune Pass ($14/month), you can download songs on the spot (particularly useful if you just stumbled upon an artist you like)!

Having WiFi turned on while you listen also gives you access to some nifty extras like artist biographies and photos.

In addition to its musical capabilities, the Zune HD also has a few other tricks up its sleeve. From left to right, there’s the Social, HD Radio, and Photo sections of the player. The Social section is connected to your Xbox 360 friends list (if you have one). People who have Zunes and have elected to publish their playback history will show up here. Tapping on a friend brings up their most recent playlist, which you can then listen to yourself if you have a Zune Pass. The HD Radio uses your headphone cable as an antenna (and, predictably, works better outdoors). If it can’t find an HD stream of your favorite station, it flips back over to FM. Maybe it’s my antenna, but I can’t hear a huge difference between 100.7 WZLX’s HD and FM broadcasts. The only useful thing is that HD Radio allows stations to have sub-channels that you can’t tune in to with an FM tuner. WZLX, for example, has an HD-2 channel called Radio Mojo (24/7 blues). HD-1 is the digital stream of the FM station. The Photo section is pretty standard; you can browse synced pictures by folder structure or date.

Video playback is fantastic thanks to the OLED screen (but sadly I don’t have a video camera to show you). Despite its resolution (480×272), the Zune HD’s screen has a 16:9 aspect ratio. This fits most HD content out of the box without any letterboxing. If you’re worried about the amount of space videos would take up on a device with 32GB of space, don’t worry. The Zune desktop software automatically converts WMV, H.264, or MPEG-4 videos when it syncs with your device. If you own a Zune High Definition Media Dock (overpriced in my opinion at $79), you can put the full-sized version of said videos on the Zune and output them at 1080p via HDMI.

So it the Zune HD a worthy competitor to the iPod touch? I certainly think so! Despite some usability issues when it comes to playback, the Zune is a breath of fresh air in an iPod-dominated, “do everything” media player market. I don’t need a bunch of apps on my media player, I just want it to play music, videos, and check out what’s on the radio every so often. The Zune HD definitely delivers with a fantastic screen, solid audio and video playback, and great industrial design.