The Zune is the worst consumer electronic device I have ever purchased in my life. I WAS a zune lover. My love was lost, it was a tragic story.
My Zune was lovingly purchased from Amazon and arrived in my arms that beautiful Fall afternoon. The injected-mold soft-plastic shell was comfortable and hard to stratch which made it enjoyable. The screen was large for the time, lovely in colour and style. 30GB? That was 10 more than an iPod Classic back then! The screen? Large and impressive. The built-in radio? The iPod didn't have it, but I did.
But these initial loves wore off as our relationship left it's first week. Things got complicated, arguments started to arrive. Zune just never listened.
* Accesories were a bitch. Very few places had them. A basic plug cost $30. An FM transmitter for the car cost $85, and a car charger was $50 (so a car trip cost ~$125... for a MP3 player that cost $250).
* I stupidly bought into the whole "Welcome to the Social" aspect. I thought tons of people would have their Zune on so we could wirelessly find each other to swap music. I never found anyone. I soon learned that having this feature enabled drained the battery, so a majority of people kept it off. Sad. There was no "Social."
* I bought the Zune-Pass, the unlimited music service for $15 a month. It seemed worth it... I don't pirate music and it was unlimited downloads and plays. Worst music service I have ever used.
* The DRM on Zune-pass songs expires in about a week meaning I had to plug in my Zune at least once a week to sync... which means the moment I wanted music the most it would say "sorry, your music expired!" Expired? Didn't I subscribe and pay for this service? What if I went on a trip for longer than a week?
* The Zune-pass service constantly had problems streaming to my computer, constantly crashing and losing music.
* The Zune Pass service kept removing my favourite bands from the service which was bizarre... shouldn't they be adding more bands instead of subtracting? And even though I downloaded these bands before they were removed, the DRM eventually expired and I had dead WMA files.
* Zune pass was most deceiving for how their service functioned. It advertises unlimited music downloads and such, but not all the music was unlimited. Some music is locked down, meaning you had to pay for it even though you subscribed to an "unlimited service". So it was more of a "some is unlimited" service with no clear indication what that was. Also, you had to buy the music with Microsoft points, which translates to about 79 Points to 1 Dollar, and you could only buy points in blocks of 500. Yeah, I know.
* It could show video, but the Zune Marketplace had really no videos to offer. So what was I to do? Answer: I could buy music videos for it... that's it. Or maybe find some neat random wmv videos on the web I guess? Or maybe Zune was hoping I would stuff all my home videos on it for some reason.
* The software is Windows Media Player reskinned. Problem is that it has to run independently of Windows Media Player, meaning that if you made your playlists in one program it wouldn't work with the other... even though the software was virtually the same. Also, the software was very clunky and crashed frequently. Having both WMP and the Zune software open at the same time caused a rip in the space-time continuum.
* Advertised feature was that you could stream it to your xBox360. I don't know about you, but streaming gives me the idea that the Zune wifi could send music to the xbox360 without wires because the Zune has built-in wifi. However, that's not the case. It is actually your home computer that streams... not the Zune itself. So your computer Zune program does pretty much what your Windows Media Center is already capable of. Oh, and if you wanted to use your actual Zune with your 360 you had to plug it in with the USB cable... sometimes the content would work... if DRM felt like letting you today!
* Battery drained quickly, never really got the life it promised (never got 13 hours).
* Video was very incompatible. If the Zune software didn't like the format, it would either not show up or it would take minutes to hours to convert it to the right format for use on the Zune. During this conversion the software sometimes crashed, having to restart the process over.
* When watching video, there's no real good skip button. If your watching a 45 minute show you can't really fast forward that well if you want to start halfway in-between... it takes several minutes to fast forward.
* No podcasts :(.
* Not Mac compatible, meaning that my Mac wouldn't work with it. I would have liked that option.
* A new version of the Zune software came out, making the interface pink and also misplacing a lot of my playlists... even deleting them. Playlists take a while to organize, so it made me upset.
* I gave up trying to put photos on this thing. It just never worked quite correctly.
* Constant freezing and UI problems.
* What is the WiFi for? At the time, Zune couldn't even sync via WiFi... it was there to find other Zune users which I previous mentioned didn't really work since no one kept their WiFi on in fear that it would drain their batteries faster.
* I had a really tough time figuring out how to cancel my Zune service when I gave up on it. The Zune subscription service is not actually on the Zune website but on an alternative Microsoft website.
* iTunes content does not work, incompatible with iTunes to sync... had to burn my Apple AAC music and then rip it back to the computer.
* The Zune gained a dead pixel shortly after a month, which was mildly annoying. I decided to deal with it and not worry about losing my new toy. Six months later, 1 dead pixel turned into 4.
------
Long story short, the Zune was probably the worst consumer electronic device I ever purchased. It was a terrible product, I was deceived by it's feature sets, felt ripped off by the music service, and was flabbergasted by the software it came with.
I went back to iPods. It was an overall terrible experience and it will take some act of God to get me to buy another one of these devices.
