REVIEW: Microsoft's Zune HD is a nifty media player
When discussing their respective approaches to product development, I’m fond of comparing Apple to a sniper and Microsoft to Tony Montana.
Apple is covered in camouflage and lying motionless a mile from its target. When the moment’s right, they squeeze off one shot from outta nowhere and hit what they aimed for, dead-center and no doubt about it.
Microsoft bursts in with an AK and starts spraying the room. They just adjusting their aim until the line of bulletholes in the wall catches up to what it was trying to hit in the first place.
It’s messy, it’s inelegant, and it’s embarrassing on some level … but eventually, it works.
Witness the new Zune HD. Microsoft has finally hit its target squarely. It’s a wonderful player that triumphantly justifies its existence in a world dominated by iPods. This statement will come as a significant shock to folks who remember how I began my review of the original Zune a few years ago. As I recall, I wrote that the overall user experience was like having an airbag deploy in your face.
That was when Microsoft started firing bullets. As I keep using the (regrettably Windows-only) Zune HD, I continue to find features and elements that I wish my iPod Touch had.
First, let’s get on with the setup process. Setting up the first generation Zune was like trying to stuff a cat into vet carrier. It fought me for so long and with such determination that I soon lost sight of my simple, functional goal and it became an angry and prideful matter of asserting my dominance in the house.
Setting up a Zune HD is no more difficult than setting up an iPod. As with previous incarnations, the Zune HD requires the installation of a desktop manager. But the thing was up and running after a download and a few clicks, and before long the Zune app had located all of the music and video in my laptop’s library (including the entire contents of my iTunes library folder) and indexed it all.
And here’s a nice touch: though the Zune didn’t automatically duplicate all of my iTunes podcast subscriptions, it looked at the library’s tags and did the sensible thing. “The Bugle,” “SMODcast,” “Creative Screenwriting” et al were properly listed under the Zune app’s “Podcasts” tab, and I could subscribe to each of them by clicking a single button.
The Zune app is to the Zune HD what iTunes is to an iPod. It manages your desktop library and connects you to the Zune Marketplace. It’s a useful, clean app but the UI is a mixed bag. There are times when I wish that Microsoft went with a dull, utilitarian interface like iTunes. After two days of using the Zune app there are still times when I’m not exactly sure where I am, or how to get back to the dashboard-like “here’s a list of every track in the library” view.
This is most likely due to the fact that the app has four distinctive faces and places. It makes the app a little less elegant, but overall it’s a plus for the user. Each section of the app has its own interface, tailored to the needs of the operation. The “Collection” view is straight-faced, orderly, and iTunes-like. “Marketplace” and “Social” keep the store and your social connections out of the way of other operations.
You can play music in just about any section of the app but “Quickplay” is an enhanced mode specifically tailored for the playback experience. It’s a beautiful, dynamic interface appropriate for large screens; it’s both pretty to look at and highly informative, whether your screen is eighteen inches in front of you or if your on a sofa ten feet away from the desk.
Navigating your music library and located content is a slick operation. The most recently-added content is graphically arranged right there in front of you. To the left is another attractive patchwork of thumbnails representing items you’ve “pinned” to the display; thus, it’s easy to always get at perennially-favorite albums, audiobooks, and movies. Once you’ve started the music playing, you can easily bring up a “Mixview” that surrounds the album with thumbnails of related artists, drawn from the Marketplace and your own library, and accessible via s single click.
(But did Urszula Dudziak really “inspire” Imogen Heap, as Mixview claims? I dunno. I can’t find any evidence of that online. She’s a lovely singer, regardless.)
Overall, Quickplay makes the fixed iTunes user interface look like the sort of screen that a Russian power plant employee stares at for twelve hours a day.
Zune’s “Smart DJ” feature is a fairly 1:1 analog of Apple’s “Genius” feature (though it’s only available on the Zune desktop app, not the mobile player). It’s useful, though it doesn’t appear to be as psychic as Genius. Microsoft tells me that Zune is informed of relationships between artists and tracks via a potpourri of information, including established info in the All Music Guide, data “from participating labels” (hmm…is this a sly form of marketing?) and handmade connections made in-house by elves working for Zune Marketplace.
Here on Day Two of usage, I find that the Smart DJ’s picks are fine, but not exciting. Apple has a natural advantage: their Genius system is a company secret, but it’s based on millions of iTunes users anonymously sharing their track and playlist data with iTunes. Giant flame-belching computational war machines grind through all of the data and inform your copy of iTunes that if you don’t follow “God’s Song” by Randy Newman with Elvis Costello’s “Man Out Of Time” then you are a bloody fool, sir. And it’s almost always right.
The Zune Marketplace tried to set itself apart from the iTunes Store early on by hitting Apple where they were most vulnerable: the cost of buying individual tracks. The Marketplace is more than happy to sell you your music for keeps, sure. But for fifteen bucks a month, you can get a “Zune Pass” which buys you a subscribscription to the Marketplace’s entire library of millions of songs. You can browse and grab tracks and whole albums at no additional cost. They’ll live on in your music library and synced to your Zune player … so long as you keep paying fifteen bucks a month, of course.
That’s already a hugely desirable feature. And it’s another serious Envy Point for iPod users. With the Zune, I can download Imogen Heap’s entire latest album moments after David Letterman is done thanking her for playing on the show. With iTunes, I just bought the one song she played and sat on it for days while I mulled the expense of downloading the rest of the album.
Thus the Zune is paradise for musical explorers. Acquisition can be spawned by a mere vague interest, and thus a vague interest can create a passionate following for a performer. 15 bucks a month seems like short money for that kind of service.
And when a subscription service has been mated with a “Smart DJ” feature … my mouth starts to water a little. Who cares if the Smart DJ isn’t a true Genius? It can draw its recommendations from what I already own and from tracks I can download at no extra cost from the Marketplace!
Alas, I’ve yet to explore the true power of this idea. Though Microsoft promises me that Smart DJ does indeed incorporate Marketplace content (there’s even a simple checkbox to enable the feature) I’ve found it to be hit-or-miss. I was surprised, and just a little bit offended, when the Zune software finished analyzing my music library for the first time and started downloading a Petula Clark song based on my tastes, but I was pleased that it had shown initiative. But all too often, the playlists it creates are devoid of Zune Pass content.
Microsoft tells me that the DJ gets smarter as you build more playlists and it learns more about what you like.
A couple of final notes on the Marketplace. Microsoft has added TV shows and movies (for purchase or rental) to the experience, chipping away at one of the key advantages of iPods. Their offerings are by no means as expansive as what you’d find on the iTunes Store (and something tells me you’re unlikely to ever find any Pixar releases there). But the very top Video Marketplace page featured two of my favorite movies of 2009 (“Coraline” and “The Great Buck Howard”) so I’m optimistic.
These video selections are responsible for the “HD” in Zune HD. By plugging the Zune into a $90 HDMI-equipped dock, you can play content on your HDTV at 720p resolution, as well as listen to music and control the player via a remote.
(Oh, and the Zune HD also incorporates an HD radio receiver. Noted, but do many people really use a portable media player’s radio? Apart from when they’re working out at the gym and it’s the only way to get the audio from the episode of “Project Runway” playing on the flatscreens?)
I can’t move on without pointing out a huge drawback of purchasing content from the Zune Marketplace: it’s always at least a partial ripoff. The iTunes Store accepts real money. The Marketplace only takes “points,” which you can only buy in bundles, and it’s impossible to buy only the amount of points you need to buy the thing you want. So in effect, you’re always paying Microsoft a tax in the form of surplus points that you have no hope of ever really using.
Shame, shame.
Onward, at last, to the actual Zune HD ... which can sync wirelessly, via WiFi. Another Point Of Envy. Apple argues that an iPod WiFi sync feature would be ungodly slow. They’re right, where filling a 16 gigabyte device is concerned. But I sync every day, and normally we’re just talking about two or three new podcasts, here. I’d love to click a button on my iPod, drop it in my pocket, finish packing up my stuff, and know that by the time my car is out of the driveway and out of reach of my home WiFi network, the device is up to date.
The Zune HD is slimmer, shorter, and noticeably lighter than an iPod Touch or an iPhone. Its screen supports multitouch (pinch to zoom in, stretch to zoom out, that sort of stuff) and it passes the most important test of a touch-based gadget: it can keep up with your swipes, touches, and gestures without any significant lag, and all scrolling and sliding of UI elements is smooth and confident.
The 480x272 screen resolution is a bit lower than that of a Touch (480x320) owing to the Zune’s true HD aspect ratio. But when using the Zune indoors, the quality of the display more than makes up for the slightly smaller acreage. The Zune’s screen is OLED. Blacks are utterly black and when the colors of a piece of album art are meant to pop, they damned-near poke your eye out.
But a media player such as the Zune or the iPod Touch needs to handle a wide range of imagery. If the Zune is superior in displaying graphics and album art, it’s not as strong when it comes to viewing video. Skin tones appear to be a little oversaturated. And though both displays aren’t at their best when outdoors, the iPod’s screen is brighter and easier to view in sunlight.
The photo is intentionally overexposed; otherwise, it’d be difficult to make out the Zune HD display at all.
But the Zune HD’s UI is a serious leap forward from what you get from the iPod’s built-in media player.
The iPod’s is clear, simple, and effective; moreover, it’s consistent with every other iPod and iPhone app, providing a seamless user experience throughout the device.
Good. But it’s also dull.
The Zune UI is magnificent. It’s visually exciting without placing style over substance. It’s easy to drill down into each feature without losing sight of the thing you need to touch to get back to where you were, or access the feature that’s on your mind at the moment. User-interface elements slide in and out smoothly and responsively.
Overall, it’s a tremendously clever way to make a handheld screen seem like it’s just a small window onto a much larger experience.
I particularly like the items you’ll find to the left of the main Zune HD menu. It’s a simple, subtle sidebar that always displays thumbnails representing the currently-playing media, items you’ve “pinned” there for ready access, and a “history” section of all of the content (music, video, radio stations) you’ve used recently.(I hereby award three more Envy points for the UI as a whole; and three additional Envy points just for this sidebar. Apple: c’mon. We know you’re willing to steal ideas if it’ll benefit the user. Steal, steal, steal this sidebar.)
Even when the Zune is simply playing music, it’s not content to waste the two minutes it has before it turns off the display. It downloads artwork about the band you’re listening to and builds a slick multimedia screen saver which floats the album art and track data through the screen, big and bold. You can read it without picking the device up and scrutinizing menus.
The Zune Marketplace is deeply embedded in the player and here again it greatly expands the role of the Zune ... provided of course you’re somewhere within reach of WiFi. If you’re finally sick to death of hearing the same damned REM album you’ve been listening to since your junior year in high school, tap a “Related” button for more REM tracks available on the store and bands that are somehow related. The Zune will turn on its WiFi radio, download a list of tracks, and make them available for immediate streaming.
The same problem hits you here as it did in the desktop Zune app: it’s hard to know when the Zune will be able to find related content. It suggested five jazz musicians related to Bill Evans (along with a bio) but zip on Green Day, apart from a band photo. Some poking around on the Marketplace makes me think that this weakness that it’s related to the limited availability of some bands’ content (only a single Green Day album appears to be available for download via Zune Pass), but only time will tell if this most useful feature turns into something that you simply expect to work every time, regardless of the artist.
Otherwise, the Zune provides a simple but deep music experience. To be honest, the interface isn’t all that different from Zune 1.0. It turns out that it was a touch-based interface all along; the weird square strokable clicky-button on the original Zune, combined with a cluster of redundant buttons, did nothing to endear the device.
The HD has only three mechanical buttons, and they’re all quite sensible: Power; a “home” button that always takes you a step back from wherever you are; and a third button that overlays a familiar virtual pad of playback and volume buttons regardless of what mode the Zune is in. It’s all discoverable and easy to get to.
The Zune does have a bit of ambition about it, beyond being a media player.
There’s an onboard web browser. It’s handy, but not up to the standard you’ll find on the iPod Touch or major smartphones. It’s slow and doesn’t always render pages correctly. But it’s a nice freebie.
There’s an App Store, too. But I don’t know what to make of it yet. At launch, there are a handful of arcade games available for free download (only via the desktop Zune app), a calculator, and a weather app. Microsoft promises a few social-networking apps in the next couple of months.
But there’s no evidence that there’s an ambitious plan to turn the Zune into a true pocket computer, or even a game machine. I can’t get any information suggesting that there’s even any kind of an open API or developer program. How anyone would ever write an app and get it to the App Store is an utter mystery. For these reasons, I have to (initially) dismiss any consideration of the Zune as something more than a media player.
Inevitably, you have to set the Zune next to the iPod Touch — no, let’s set it on the table between the Touch and the iPod Nano — and ponder its place in the grand scheme of things.
And that alone is a hell of a compliment, considering the Zune’s horrible pedigree. Previously, a Zune would at best be wedged underneath this table’s short leg to keep it from wobbling.
(You’d probably have been well-advised to cover it with a cloth or something, so that guests wouldn’t know that you actually owned a Zune.)
The new Zune HD is a wonderful player. The price is a bit unfortunate: $219 for a 16 gig model, compared with $199 for an 8 gig iPod Touch and $149 for an 8 gig Nano. You can get a 32 gig Zune for $289.
If the cheapest model were $179, then this would have been such an orderly universe and such a tempting buy. The end of this review would go something like this: “For Windows users, the Zune HD is the perfect bridge between the Nano and the Touch. If you’re passionate about music and don’t care much about the added features you’ll get from an iPod Touch, you should give the Zune some careful consideration.”
The Zune is all about the music. The Zune Marketplace offers buffet-style music consumption via the monthly Zune Pass subscription. Related tracks and recommendations from friends are always within easy reach. And the player represents a more pleasant music-playing experience than anything that iTunes or the iPod can offer. It’s a fine pick.
But if you want a device that’s only mostly about the music and you want to get some cool additional features, an iPod is still the best value. It’s a little cheaper and it does so much more. Even if you have no interest in reading ebooks or managing a shopping list, there are hundreds of iPhone/iPod apps for listening to streaming music from Pandora, Last.fm, and just about every other major music service and streaming radio station you can mention. The iPod Touch is a device that redefines itself with every app you install.
Oh, and both the iPod Touch and the Nano have onboard speakers. It’s no great shakes in terms of room-filling fidelity, but at least it’s something. The Zune HD is mute without headphones.
But truly, the Zune HD is a magnificent player. It’s such a huge improvement over the preceding Zunes that Microsoft probably should have “Vista”ed the product completely. Retire the name permanently and assert that this is a new thing and a fresh start.
That’s an idea that Microsoft should steal from Apple. I have no doubt that at a certain point in its development, the iPod, the iPhone, and even the rumored Apple Tablet sucked as badly as the first Zune. There are holes in the desert outside of Cupertino that mutely attest to how good Apple is at making sure that nobody outside of the company ever learns about the mistakes they made on their way to a finalized product.
Dig a hole somewhere. Drop all of the preceding Zunes in there. Forget they ever existed. The Zune HD is all about Patience Rewarded. We’ve all read about the guy who (unfathomably) loved his first-generation Zune enough to get a tattoo of the Zune logo.
To this man I say: you can now wear short sleeves with pride.