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Review: Zune Is A Waste of Time

My little brother is in China for the next week. He took off with my new iPod, and I’m relegated to his Zune. He wanted the Nano’s better battery life and decided to be thrifty with 1/7th of the Zune’s capacity. Gut always told me this thing would be a hassle, but this is ridiculous:

  • The software, while sexy, is bloated, slow and buggy.
  • I can’t buy movies or TV shows.
  • I have to use third party software (I have to pay for) to convert what I do have to a Zune-friendly format.
  • That process takes hours on end.
  • Turning the damn thing off requires holding down two buttons on the directional pad.

Plus: it just flat out cannot interact with my MacMini which acts as my media center. So I have to pull my media off my external, onto the Mini, then onto the PC. Easy enough on a home network, but still a step I don’t want or need.

Total garbage.



-Shlok
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4 Comments
  • Dan tdaxp
    Dec 24, 2007

    For much of the 1990s Microsoft owned the middle ground between power and ease of use — Macs were too limited, while Unix machines were too obscure.

    This stopped being true a while ago. MS products are now both harder to use and less powerful than the competition, especially Mac OS X.

    I still run Windows, but do not plan to buy another windows-based machine.

    Reply
  • J. Kauffman
    Dec 25, 2007

    Why the China excursion?
    Both of us have brothers traveling to communist Asia. Bizarre.

    Reply
  • Nelson Blaha
    Dec 26, 2007

    I set up my sister’s new iPod Shuffle this morning, and was disappointed with the experience. Copying an mp3 to the device wasn’t sufficient (as it is with my linux-friendly Sandisk Sansa e260). I had to go get a program to emulate iTunes’ database-building activities. It must be next to impossible to use an iPod without iTunes on a mac or pc. By contrast, my Sansa can do the MTP bullshit if you want it to, or it can act as a flash drive to drag files onto (it builds its own damn database). It also has a user-replaceable battery, which I found very thoughtful. I got 4GB of solid-state memory for the same price as my sister’s 1GB shuffle 4 months ago, and it’s not much bigger.

    Reply
  • Macs forever.

    Reply
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