I saw a sign at Wal-Mart that the new zune players are coming out Nov. 13th. I bought one of the old 30 gig versions a month ago and I love it. I've never owned an ipod, so I can't compare the two, but I've had no issues thus far. I've got a shitload of albums on there, as well as keeping a season or two of the office, Bleach, or any other half hour long show I can find to watch on my lunchbreaks at work. While they were still doing all you can eat, I'd load up a movie and head to olive garden.

The new ones look pretty cool. They eliminated my 30 gig model, now it's 4/8/80 gig for choices. The screen is supposedly bigger, but from the picture it looks around the same size. I'm really interested in seeing what wal-mart has for a price on the 80 gig. I'm constantly swapping out albums since my music collection is around 80 gig. I'd be interested in buying an 80 gig for myself, and 'donating' the 30 gig to my girlfriend.

Anyone else here using the Zune, or are you all loyal ipod fans?

Wow, I just found this:

http://www.buy.com/prod/microsoft-zune-30g...tml?adid=17260&s_kwcid=&dcaid=17260

30 gig zune for $99. Compared to almost $200 for an 8 gig ipod, that's amazing. I paid $179 for my zune a month ago.

I'm a huge fan of the touch screen ipods after dicking around with one for a while.

Portability, display, and userfriendlyness beats the zune hands down, plus it's got a built in web browser.

It's too bad the hard drive options aren't any bigger.

ArrowHead likes Pie said:

The 8 gig and below ipods are expensive and have flash drives.

The 8 gig costs the same as the 80 gig I think.

80G ipods are $250. You really won't find a 30G player anywhere else for $99, especially not one as good as the zune.

You are correct about the flash memory. The new 4/8 gig zune are the same way and they're equally expensive. The bigger hardrive models still give you the better storage for your money. Those ipod touch you like are all flash based, and will run you $400 for 16 gig. A neat toy, buy a horrible waste of money considering what you're really getting.

If you could get an 80G ipod with video for less than $200 I'd have one. I spent a couple days shopping around when I bought mine, and capacity was my #1 priority. I didn't even know shit about zune til I bought it, at first I was bummed it wasn't an ipod. Now I'm pretty happy though, bigger screen, cheaper, and it works exactly how I want it to.

niccolai said:

Portability - Zune is just as small as an ipod. It's about 2 mm thicker, but the new zune2 are 1/3 smaller.

Display - itouch gives you a 3.5 inch display and 16 gig of storage for $400. Zune2 is a 3.2 inch with 80G for $250 The zune1 is merely 3.0 inches, but 30G of storage for $99.

Web Browser - Zune also has wifi, and web browser is planned for zune2 down the road. Cool thing is that they are updating the firmware on zune1, so it will have all the same features as 2 except for the wireless syncing ability.



I really see no hands down beating. I see half an inch of screen with a fraction of the storage, at 4 times the price. Maybe in a few years when I can get an 80G itouch I'll get one.

I don't get it... if you have one already, why get anew one?

comparing the 80gb zune and a 15gb touch is like comparing the shittiest dell laptop (that just happens to have a huge hard drive) and the cutting edge alienware laptop with an SSD. they are two different things. the zune might have that cool sharing feature, but let's face it, there is a reason this iPod knock-off is $99.

I have a 60gb iPod and I don't need anything more until this one breaks.

the_reverend said:

Yeah, because it's brown. They don't make brown anymore, so this is an obvious clearance offer. 30G zune normally cost $170-200 (Mine was $179). The 80g is going to be $250, just like ipod. It's not so much a knockoff, it's just that microsoft blew the marketing and such the first time around. It looks too much like an ipod, and the DRM on the song-sharing feature was gay, so they didn't sell as well. Feature for feature, the zune really holds its own. Now that they're pushing pricing and trying to market better I'm sure you'll start seeing a lot of them.

You're right, the itouch is bleeding edge, and is as comparable as it is viable. As for vanilla zune vs. ipod, there's little difference. Ipod is more prominent and accessible (more available accessories and toys) while the zune comes with more features.

As for why I'd get a new one: My girlfriend wants an mp3 player. I would like a larger HD, so I could fit the majority of my collection on there. Right now I can only fit around half.

I have about 180GB now, but a lot of it I wouldn't want to listen to more than once.

I only have like 60 gigs worth in my music collection, but I don't listen to like 40 gigs of it ever, so it's not very important that I have over 20 gigs of space if that.

I don't have an issue with the zune, but when I bought my 30 gig ipod, the zune was more expensive, I HATE the idea of converting all of my audio to faggotty worthless WMAs, and the zune was a brick in comparison. The interface of the actual player is cool, but I don't like the software (Then again, I don't like apple's either).


If they could cram that 16 gig HD in an Iphone I'd buy an Iphone in a heartbeat. it seems kindof silly that they advertise those as MP3 players but you can't fit more then a road trips worth of songs on it.

I would be wicked happy with just 60 gig, but since it's almost the same price for 80 I'd go for 80. I'd want space for around 40 gig of music that I would rarely switch around, and use the leftover room to keep tv shows and movies and such to watch.

BTW: You're right that the zune was more expensive than the ipod when they first came out. It's evened out at this point. You DON'T have to rip your cd's to wma though, you can set the software to rip to mp3 instead.

The software was also updated, however it's going to change again on the 13th to a whole new software (instead of a tweaked up version of media player) which I currently know nothing about. It may suck, it may be awesome. I know the software I initially got was HORRIBLE, but then there was an update and now everything is working exactly the way I want it. The new version is likely going to suck in that case, because it's well known that microsoft hates me.

The only thing I'd really want different with the software is the ability to group albums by a single artist by date instead of alphabetically. You can look at the whole collection by date, but if you're just looking at a single artist it automatically lists the albums by alphabet. Pretty gay.

If you have about 20 minutes of spare time you could probably buy a 180gb 1.8 hdd and install it in the $99 30gb Zune.

niccolai said:

no moving parts.... its flash mofo

BobNOMAAMRooney nli said:

Would that work? That's a pretty good idea.

ArrowHead likes Pie said:

Yeah, I'm fairly certain that the Zune uses the exact same Toshiba 1.8 hdd my Gigabeat uses. Once you've made the swap all you should have to do is put the firmware onto the new drive.

Just flash it like I were updating the firmware?

ArrowHead likes Pie said:

I copied the firmware from the 40gig to my computer, disconnected it from the mp3 player, put the other drive in its place and dragged the firmware files onto the new drive.