Microsoft recently released their 3rd generation Zune media player – the Zune HD. Whereas the previous Zune players relied upon d-pads and squircles to move around the user interface, the Zune HD is full multi-touch wonder, and it is very well done. In fact, if it weren’t so pretty, you might almost say that it’s over done. It’s almost embarrassingly schwanky and fun-to-use.
But let’s dig in to other items first.
PRICING
Current pricing for the Zune HD is $219 (US) for the 16GB version, and $289 (US) for the 32GB version. While that pricing is competitive and slightly cheaper than the similarly equipped iPod Touch devices, it seems like a better choice would’ve been to totally undercut Apple on this point.
Also, I know that memory is sold in particular quantities and sizes (8GB, 16GB, etc.), but why can’t they figure out how to release different memory sizes for these? For instance, a 40GB Zune HD that is comparatively priced to a 32GB iPod Touch would seem like a better value (to me) than being $10 or $20 cheaper. I should know if this is technically feasible or not, but I’m really not sure. You would think it wouldn’t be too difficult.
PACKAGING
The Zune HD comes in a fairly small and sturdy box. The top of the box slides upward to reveal the player, with manuals, earbuds, and USB cable packaged neatly behind it.
If “unboxing” write-ups are your thing, then check out the Engadget article covering this. Honestly, though… it’s just a box.
SPECS
The Zune HD is easily one of the most advanced media players you will find on the market today, featuring…
- 3.3” OLED capacitive touch display (480×272 resolution)
- Measures 2.07” x 4.08” x .35”
- Weighs a paltry 2.6 ounces (compared to the 4.1oz iPod Touch)
- Powered by the Nvidia Tegra processor
- Flash-based storage
- Multi-touch display
- HD radio on-board
- 802.11b/g wireless support
- Accelerometer
- MP3, WMA, AAC and MP4 audio support
- 720p HD video output (via optional dock)
- Equalizer
- 660 mAh Lithium-Ion battery
- Web browser, Apps and Games
HANDS-ON
Before you ever even turn the device on, you immediately notice how little it weighs. Although 2.6oz doesn’t mean a whole lot to me on paper, it sure translates into a nice experience when you’re holding it. My recently-acquired MyTouch 3G phone isn’t exactly heavy, but there’s no doubt that the Zune HD weighs less. In fact, with the metal casing and glass screen, it just feels like a nicely designed & assembled piece of hardware. At least two of my iPhone-toting friends remarked at how nice the form factor is. It really makes the iPhone feel incredibly large. Zune phone anyone?
Like most touch-enabled devices of today, the physical buttons are mostly absent. The top of the device has a rectangular Power/Sleep button that is flush with the casing. The left-hand side features a slightly bumped out Media Button that brings up the volume and track fwd/back controls, no matter where you are. Finally, the Home Button is placed just below the Zune logo on the front of the player. That’s it. No other physical controls are present.
The bottom of the Zune HD is also where you’ll find the standard 3.5mm headphone jack and dock port.
The back of the casing features a nicely etched Zune logo, your serial number (toward the bottom) and the obligatory FCC information, though very faint. The lower left-hand side has the words “hello from seattle” in very small text, something that every Zune has sported somewhere.
The Zune HD comes with very typical earbuds (+ colorful foam covers) that I would never, ever use. They sound decent, or so I’m told, but that style of earbud absolutely kills my ears. I am continuing to use the Zune Premium headphones that shipped with my Zune 80. Otherwise, the only other hardware of note is the standard Zune port-to-USB cable.
USER INTERFACE
In my personal opinion, the “twist” interface on the Zune has been the best of any media player out there. The ability to move horizontally and vertically among your collection is both fun and easy-to-use. The Zune HD retains the “twist” tradition, while adding ‘touchability’ to the mix for additional control, shortcuts, and some pretty cool stuff.
As an interesting aside, a good friend of mine was taking a look at my Zune HD. He noted that something (I don’t remember what) was not entirely intuitive on the Zune HD. It got me thinking. What is “intuitive”? Should all functions be readily apparent without ever having read a manual or having used a similar product? How low do you set the bar? These are interesting questions. Microsoft has historically been *very* conservative and overly explanative with their interfaces. Windows NT 4.0 featured an arrow that flew across the taskbar, poked the Start button, and said “click here to Start”. It was fine for Grandma who’d never used a PC, but it was pretty ridiculous for the rest of us. These days, however, Microsoft seems to count on the fact that more and more people know how to use a computer, and thus can figure out most of the interface on their own. “Intuitive” is almost better stated as “consistent” – both with their own product, as well as other products on the market. I read the Zune HD manual after the fact, but otherwise figured out on my own how to play music, use the radio, add a favorite in the browser, and scroll through pictures. To me, that means they’ve accomplished “intuitive”.
</soapbox>
The Zune HD now features a “wallpaper”, of sorts, which ends up acting more as a shade to what is going on behind the scenes. When you turn the Zune HD on, you are greeted with the (customizable) shade, the time, notification icons, and an arrow pointing up – which is the direction that you flick the shade to get the homescreen. As best I can figure, this shade helps protect the user from unnecessarily messing with the player while in a pocket or purse. If you happened to hit a button accidently, you would still have to flip the shade to do much more. A safety feature, I suppose, and a fun way to personalize your device, since the rest of the player only allows for the default black background.
All that said, it seems like the swiping up motion to clear the shade is a bit problematic at times. It requires a fairly intentional swiping motion, and it occasionally not ready to be swiped after first turning the screen on. Here’s hoping these issues are remedied with a future firmware update.
The homescreen is really broken into two main parts: the category list and the quickplay. When one part is made prominent, the other shrink down and off to its respective side. It’s really an amazingly clever way to give access to more functionality, without having to mess with an interface that is already known.
homescreen: As you can see in my very awesome, custom graphic, the homescreen gives the ability to launch several things all from one place. Get used to this, because the Zune HD is all about having a lot of choices from various views. In this case, you can select any of the various ‘categories’ on the right-hand side, click on the ‘Play’ circle to begin playing all of your music, or you can click on the left-hand side ‘Quickplay’ area for access to a number of handy things.
quickplay: The small quickplay area on the left becomes the prominent portion of the screen just by clicking on it. Actually, you can switch between the two main screens by either swiping back and forth, clicking on the respective side, or simply hitting the home button. They really want you to use the quickplay functionality, and you really ought to be. It’s wonderful!
Back to the subject at hand, though, the quickplay area is broken into (at most) four sections: Now Playing, Pins, History, and New. The ‘Now Playing’ portion only shows when you return to the homescreen while you’re playing music, radio, or a podcast. It will show an album cover (or similar) of whatever you’re currently playing, along with ‘Playing’ or ‘Paused’ text above it. ‘Pins’ are like favorites for the media you have on your Zune HD. Like a particular album, artist, or genre? Pin it to your quickplay area where you can quickly get at it. You can also pin podcasts, pictures, radio stations, browser favorites, and apps. Nice! The ‘History’ area, as you might expect, shows media that you’ve accessed most recently. Finally, the ‘New’ section shows media that you’ve most recently added, which is great when you’ve downloaded a few new albums that you want to remember to listen to.
music: Hopefully, playing music is the primary job of your Zune HD. After all, that’s where this device excels above all others in this category. Clicking on ‘Music’ from the homescreen whisks the word “music” to the top of the screen and zooms in, revealing your Artists view. From here you can scroll downward and roll through the artists, swipe side-to-side to get at playlists, genres, albums, etc., or hit a boxed [E] letter (see the photo) to bring up the full alphabet view where you can go straight to all artists beginning with that letter. It’s really a fairly ingenious (and fast) way of moving around, and yet retains the “twist” interface that Zune has used for years. It’s more of the same, but better. Not only that, but other items are immediately clickable from this view. Click the ‘Play’ circle next to an artist and begin playing all albums from that artist. Rather dig in? Click on the Artist name to get at their albums, pics, bio, and related. Finally, click on the top of the screen where the cropped ‘Music’ text lives to go back to the previous screen. This is a consistent feature when moving around the Zune HD interface.
While playing music, the ‘now playing’–type view has an astonishing amount of control. As you can see in the picture above, you have access to no less than 7 distinct functions all from a single view. What you actually see is certainly far less cluttered than my photoshopped screenshot, so you’ll need to imagine this without all of the red arrows and text. The ‘now playing’ view let’s you easily see the artist (bold), the album (just below it), the album artwork, the current song (just below the artwork), and the next three tracks coming up. You can also hit Back, toggle Shuffle and/or Repeat, and give the song a Rating, if you like. There’s more here than meets the eye, however, because much of what you see is also clickable. For instance, the Artist text will take you to the section for that artist. The area that shows the current + upcoming tracks will give you the full track list for that album (or playlist). Selecting the middle of the screen will bring up the Media Key functionality: adjusting the volume, or going FWD/BACK with your tracks.
Wow! That’s a lot of stuff, and as with most Microsoft products, really just a number of ways to accomplish the same task.
video: Strangely enough, I don’t (personally) spend a lot of time watching video on my Zune. Sure, I have the obligatory few DVDs I’ve ripped and some home movies, but nothing significant. Quite honestly, I use my Zune mostly for music.
That said, there isn’t a lot that the Zune HD offers in video playback as compared with the previous Zune players – save for a beautiful, beautiful screen. That’s really the story here. Even with a smaller screen than the iPod Touch, I’m guessing that most folks would prefer watching the Zune HD and all its OLED goodness. The colors are richer, the viewable angles are far better, and (on paper) the video-playback battery life is longer.
As you might expect, you can hit the Media Key to get on-screen playback controls during a video. Drag to fwd/rew the video, turn the volume up/down, or pause. Pretty basic stuff, and it works well.
pictures: Again, the story here is really the beautiful screen. You can browse your pictures via folder name or date, and then watch a slideshow or flip through them manually. They look wonderful.
Even more impressive, though, might be the speed at which you can flip through your pictures. The Zune HD is quite simply the most responsive handheld device I’ve ever owned. Thanks to the Nvidia Tegra processor, I imagine, and some very clever programming. You can literally flip through them as fast as your fingers will move, and then pinch to zoom (etc) that folks have come to expect.
Lastly, you can long-press a picture (or folder) to delete it, “pin” it, or (in the case of a single photo) make it your slide background.
radio: Like all previous Zunes, the Zune HD offers built-in FM radio, which only the most recent iPods have begun to offer. One of the selling points of the new Zune “HD”, however, is the inclusion of HD radio, which advertises ‘CD quality’ radio reception. Having listened to HD radio in my commuter car for the past year or so, I can honestly say that it does sound noticeably better than standard FM radio. It also offers the (very handy) ability to include the artist/song/album name info in the audio stream, which is nice.
Like other views on the Zune HD, the ‘now playing’ page for radio gives access to a number of handy functions. Notably, you can quickly add a radio preset, access your existing presets, and add the current ‘song’ or ‘show’ to your cart for later downloading on the Zune Marketplace. With an HD-enabled station, you can also swipe left or right to change between their HD offerings.
All in all, if you don’t listen to much FM, the HD radio offering may not float your boat a whole lot. It is a very nice feature, though, and well implemented.
marketplace: Building off of the 2nd generation Zune functionality, the Zune HD has full wireless access to the Zune Marketplace. Launch the Marketplace and you are greeted with (4) basic options: Music, Apps, Search, and Cart.
The ‘Music’ option takes you to a nice thumbnail view of the newest album releases, or you can swipe left/right for Top Songs or Top Albums. ‘Apps’, as you might expect, let’s you view all of the Zune apps for immediate downloading. There’s like 7 apps total right now, so it’s pretty silly. ‘Search’ looks like a typical browser search area, and brings up the Zune HD virtual keyboard. Type in your search terms, hit Done, and away you go! Everything that the Marketplace has available is at your fingertips – for streaming (Zune Pass) or purchasing via the ‘Cart’. I would imagine that you can purchase immediately if you have Microsoft Points in your account, but I have not tried that.
internet: It came as a bit of a surprise to many folks, but the Zune HD features a very capable browser. Given what Windows Mobile has offered up in terms of browsing, not much was expected in the regard, but the results are quite welcome. The IE6-based Zune HD browser is nice to look at, relatively fast, and features the typical mobile browser controls you’ve come to expect: pinch to zoom, move around with your fingers, and so forth.
The browser interface is, shall we say, very spartan. There are about (4) controls to see, and much of that is tucked away at the bottom or transparent. When push comes to shove, you realize that the “bare bones” interface is really all you need in a mobile browser: hitting Back, managing Favorites, Searching, and then interacting with your current URL. It seems almost too simplistic, but what else do you need to do that cannot be handled with those basic controls + screen manipulation? It’s very efficient, and the browser engine is surprisingly capable.
Aside from the Marketplace search, the browser is really one of the primary places in the Zune HD where you’ll use the virtual keyboard. While I don’t have hours of typing under my belt on the Zune HD, my initial reaction is that the keyboard is quite capable, and in many ways better than what is on the MyTouch 3G. It seems to be responsive and very accurate. In fact, I did a test type between the two devices, typing “echo and the bunnymen”. I had one mis-typed letter on the Zune, and I completely mangled “bunnymen” on the MyTouch 3G, which I have far more experience typing on. Guess that says something.
apps: This is certainly a point of contention amongst many reviewers and interested buyers: What is the app support on the Zune HD? To be perfectly honest, the current support is poor. Microsoft has not announced a long-term plan for what type of app support the Zune HD will have, and so we’re left wondering… and tinkering with the handful of launch day apps.
Let’s see, I have a calculator, a weather app, and some games. While they all look very nice, they take a bit too long to load, in my opinion.
What would be nice to find out are the long-term app plans for the Zune platform. Will we get XBLA games ported to the Zune? Will there be a full app marketplace with 3rd party support? I would be very surprised if Microsoft left the apps as they are currently, but without any official word from them, I can only remark about the present state of things. It’s pretty sad, but at least a small step forward from the previous iteration of Zune hardware. A very small step.
settings: I’m not going to spend too much time with this. Need to adjust your wireless link? Try out a different EQ setting? How about set a lock screen PIN? It’s all here. Enjoy.
PERFORMANCE
A nice interface is nothing if the infrastructure doesn’t support it well. The Zune HD could dance and twirl all it likes, but if it feels like the hardware is constantly chugging to keep up with you, well… the experience would be less than ideal. Thankfully, the performance is top-notch.
I don’t know a whole lot about the Nvidia Tegra processor, but I get the feeling that this is a nice piece of hardware. Either that, or the Zune team is a crack squad that can produce blood from turnips. Whatever the case, the Zune HD moves along at a clip that is nothing short of wonderful. Screens emerge quickly, transitions are smooth, and scrolling is seamless. If anything, my experience with the Zune HD has been eye-opening. This is how mobile devices are supposed to be: fast and fluid. HTC and the WinMo team need to get together and get this Tegra processor into all of their upcoming phones. Seriously. This is good stuff.
BATTERY LIFE
The Zune HD is rated at up to 33 hours for music and 8.5 hours for video. These numbers are, of course, under the most ideal conditions – wireless off, screen off (music), and not fiddling with things.
Evidently, the Nvidia Tegra processor is known to be both powerful and power-sipping. The verdict is still out on the battery life of the Zune HD, but I can’t say that I’m completely blown away just yet. If I’m listening to music for 5 hours and barely see the battery meter change, then I’m impressed. As it stands, the battery life seems to be decent, but not incredible.
WRAPPING UP
So, this “quick review” is not especially quick, but what can you do? There is a lot to talk about with all that is wrapped up in this tiny package.
Is the Zune HD the best personal media player out there? I say “yes”, with no hesitation whatsoever. If your goal is a great music listening experience, then the Zune HD is the best of the best. Hands down. If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, then the whole package just becomes that much better.
What about video support? Well, I still say that the Zune HD is wonderful for watching video, but at 32gigs max (currently) you’re only going to fit so much content on here. What you have will look great, thanks to the beautiful OLED screen. No doubt about that.
What about app support? As it stands right now, the Zune HD is *not* your best choice for apps. If you want a large selection of games, map finding apps, or something to produce bodily function sounds, then another device is a better bet for you. That said, I’m hoping that Microsoft knocks our socks with some amazing Xbox/XBLA integration in the very near future. C’mon, guys!
What else? Quite simply, there is not a nicer looking media player on the market today. The form-factor is great, the interface is amazing, and the whole package is extremely well thought out. From the wonderful navigation to the beautiful screen, the Zune HD has many features that the competition need to be seriously considering.
With exception of app support, the Zune HD has raised the bar.
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