Has anybody tried the new Zune? How does it compare with an ipod?

Answer 1

So far the new Zune is very impressive with its "bigger-than-life" screen size. I haven't picked one up as yet, however. I've had the opportunity to audition it at a retail store and so far I've been very impress with its features, awesome album arts, and the movie you can watch is almost as close as looking at a nice portable HDTV player. You may find this website very helpful:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127858/article.html

As for me personally, I'm not a fan of iPod and I don't necessarily like to go with the crowd. I like to see what other alternatives are out there. iPod in my opinion seemed overly priced, overly marketed, and overly sold. iPod audio codec (.acc) is not impressive compared to WMA (windows media audio) lossless or WMA Pro. Zune's tons of disc space for storing hundreds or thousands of songs at reasonable and decent compression at 192k is awesome. The only personal negative thing I have to say about Zune is that its toggle mechanism feels too plastic or flimsy not having the fluidity as the iPod.

Forgive me for having a particular ear to sound quality, but iPod apparently is too cliche for my eccentric sophisticated ears. It really boils down to how much consumers are unaware of the slick massive advertisement iPod is throwing out into a crowd of people who simply buy based on popularity, commercial ads, and billboard signs and not on quality and performance. It will behoove all consumers to closely do their homework.

If you want to use a compatible audio format that's universal like MP3 or WMA, you won't be making a bad choice going with Zune.

Other factors that may affect the quality of any device such as Zune is what kind of audio compression rate you're using and the quality of your headphones.

My only hope is that as a subcriber to URGE, I would hope that Zune's software is compatible to using URGE and that I have the flexibility to use the download subcription service of my choice. Currently, I'm impress with URGE. I was a recent subcriber to Yahoo Music and I had to cancell my subsription to Yahoo Music due to poor service, network bottle neck, etc. I know I may be a bit off track, but one recommendation I would like to make regarding URGE is to provide higher compression of 256 k rather than the max of up to 192 k either for downloads, streamlining, or actually purchasing a song or songs. The higher the data compression, the better the sound quality.

Answer 2

I haven't tried it, but I can tell you in general it is going to be nearly the same type of product, but with different features and different ways to use. Check out the features on line and if you see anything that really strikes you then go for it, it is from a quality companyand it will be quality. Maybe wait for a year or two though, usually new products have unforseeable problems features that really didn't work out as well as they were intended. Now, if you like iPods and are happy, than there is no reason to switch.

Answer 3

Yep, Here: http://www.myspace.com/soundonthego