Zune vs iPod

I’ve lost the link to the page, but this video serves well enough to show the Zune’s interface with its fancy schmancy menu animation, crossfades, ability to set background pics, etc. The album browser screen shown above looks much more attractive to me than Apple’s text-based listing. I know that the Zune spreads the same resolution as the iPod’s over a larger area, but - apart from the inevitable battery drain and I’d guess some coarsening of the image - I’d say it looks like a good call, at least from the available screenshots and video. I don’t know about general usability (there seems to be the typical Microsoft over-abundance of options in the video), but the Zune interface makes the iPod’s look just a tad hairshirt and almost as old fashioned as my old Nokia’s black and white screen or Apple OS 9 relative to OS X. When/if Apple finally produces a wide-screen iPod, I hope they either add something like the current photo browser but for album covers or the iTunes 7 coverflow interface.

I find the physical design of the Zune to be quite a bit less attractive than the ‘Pod and the non-scrolling wheel and separate buttons don’t come anywhere near the elegance of Apple’s solution, but the ability to customise the Zune’s screen by adding the aforementioned backgrounds serves to distract from the squareness of the unit quite a bit. I think the ability to share music via wireless is fairly attractive as well: it’s something that as a sad music freak I would like to be easier with the iPod. How often I’d use it in practice I don’t know though, and the fact that most people wouldn’t have this functionality would significantly diminish its attraction - on the other hand, it may serve to bind Zune owners into a more tightly knit group.

Both Apple and Microsoft have their (often crazed) advocates, but the Zune looks like an interesting product to this longtime Apple user.