Zune 80 GB Digital Media Player (Black) by Zune
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Digital camera reviews of Zune 80 GB Digital Media Player (Black)
Digital camera Review: ATROCIOUS!!!
Summary: 1 Stars
WOW!!! - I've just followed every therapist's advice and took my 5 minutes of "WALKING AWAY". I'm trying to write this as calmly as I can... Let's just say that Microsoft & Zune have destroyed my Christmas Day!!! - THIS PRODUCT IS A HORRIBLE EXPERIENCE IN EVERY ASPECT POSSIBLE.
ISSUES:
1) YOU CANNOT PLAY YOUR FILES FROM THE ZUNE ON YOUR COMPUTER!!!
WHAT?!? - HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE? - The Zune I got is an 80GB device & my hard disk space on my computer is also 80GB. If I'm at home & want to listen to music from the Zune... I CAN'T DO IT! I'd have to import the songs from the Zune back to my computer's hard disk!!! - Is it just me? Am I the ONLY person who would like to playback from the mp3 player on the computer? With an iPOD you connect it, iTUNES opens up, you see the device, and you can play what's IN YOUR DEVICE. Not with Zune. This device is meant to be loaded with whatever media and to be used on-the-go.
2) CUSTOMER SERVICE IS A SCARRING NIGHTMARE. You'd think that Microsoft makes enough income to not have to outsource something as important as their customer service support; but no!!! - I called the Zune support line at 9:00 A.M. on Christmas Day and got off the phone at 10:22 A.M., Along the way, I spoke with three people and we went through every possible way of dealing with this issue. The problem is that the customer service personnel don't understand fluent English very well and one has to slow things down, use simple words, and explain each issue in a child's way. Trust me folks, I work with people from India and I am a trilingual person (Born in Italy, raised in Puerto Rico, and married to a Peruvian lady); I am also a special education teacher and my job description requires extreme degrees of patience. I called, spoke simple terminology, spoke slowly, and was highly polite. THEY STILL DID NOT UNDERSTAND THE SIMPLE ISSUE OF WANTING TO PLAY WHAT'S IN THE ZUNE ON MY CPU. We edited the software, renamed files, entered the software as a "guest"... and every step of the way, the associate kept being surprised by the outcome. I was put on hold in 8 INSTANCES and finally when I asked for the supervisor, a "LEVEL 2" person got on he phone and told me that the only way to play back from the Zune on my computer is to import the files from the Zune back to the computer!?! After a few minutes of getting off the phone, I called back to ask if maybe Windows Media Player could play back what's on the Zune. After another 25 minutes and being put on hold 2 more times, the answer was "NO".
IN CONCLUSION:
IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR YOUR MUSIC ON YOUR PC OR IF YOU DON'T MIND PERFORMING 15 STEPS TO GET YOUR MUSIC BACK ONTO YOUR HARD DISK, GET THIS DEVICE. IF THIS IS NOT YOU, THEN GET AN iPod AND STAY FAR AWAY FROM THIS DEVICE. ENJOY THE HOLIDAYS FOLKS!!!
Digital camera Review: AWESOME~
Summary: 5 Stars
Good - An Amazing mp3 player in every way, shuffle song list at top of list so you don't have to go through a bunch of menus, no time between songs, good picture and video quality, Very nice and durable
Bad (Only a Minor Problem)- Cannot be used as a storage device like many mp3 devices and you must have the software downloaded to your computer to insert/remove music, won't pop up under 'My Computer'.
Digital camera Review: About as good as it gets
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm not going to spend alot of time here singing my praises of the Zune. I could spend an hour listing all the reasons why this is such a great product, but the bottom line is that the 80 gig is excellent. I'm extremely picky about my electronic toys and I always research the crap out of a major purchase item. I spent a long time comparing this to the ipod and they were neck and neck as far as pros and cons go. In the end, I received a good deal on the Zune so that was the tie breaker. I've had my Zune for a couple of weeks and I am completely satisfied with it. I've had no problems of any kind with it. I was a little apprehensive about the version 2 software because of some other "horror-story" reviews, but so far everything is working perfectly. I am glad that I opted for the Zune instead of the Ipod. Of course, nothing is perfect and there are some cons with that come with Zune. For instance, I wish the Zune marketplace was as developed as Itunes, but I'm betting they will be catching up in the near future. The only other problem I've had is trying to find a decent case for this player. There aren't alot of options to choose from for the 80 gig yet. Hopefully, that will also change in the near future.
**UPDATE**
I've had my Zune 80 for the past couple of weeks and, while my initial review was positive, I've had time to experience some of the less than satisfactory tendencies of the unit. Most of them seem to be software specific, but more about that in a minute. I haven't ever owned an IPOD, but I decided last summer to get either the 80 gig or 160 gig classic for christmas as a present to myself. I downloaded ITUNES and began ripping my collection of audio books. I have to say that I was less than impressed with Itunes. It was just not user friendly and I didn't like the layout. It also slowed my computer down. Also, I did a little research by visiting a few Apple message boards to see what IPOD owners were praising and/or complaining about regarding their IPODs. I didn't come away with as rosy a picture of Apple products after that, but I was still planning on getting a classic. A few months went by and I heard about the 80 Gig Zune. Long story short...I read the reviews and specs on the zune and decided to go with it. There really isn't any other way to say this...the zune software has been a pain. I started with version 2.2 and then updated this past week with 2.3. So far, I've re-formated my zune twice. I don't know if this was strictly necessary, but it really did seem to help the new versions of the software run more smoothly. My main problem goes back to my audio book collection. Since Zune doesn't support Audible, the only way to get a audio book onto the zune is to rip it. Just ripping one book takes a while, so you have to invest signifigant time. So far, every version (including 2.3) has had a tendency to re-name tracks, move tracks, butcher playlists, and delete tracks. The software seems to do this at random and I have no idea what prompts it to commit these changes. It does get really frustrating. Its gotten to the point that I'm afraid of sycning my zune because I have no idea what the software may randomly decide to do. For instance, this morning I was going to sync a video, so I plugged in the zune and (suprise,suprise) it decided to automatically "remove" 70 tracks from one of my books from my zune. This was a random assortment of tracks scattered over several discs that I had ripped. I have no idea why it chose that particular book because I haven't worked on it for over a week. It was installed perfectly with no flaws. The playlist still looked fine, so I tried to re-sync it to the zune and missing tracks remained missing. I tried to play one of the missing tracks from my pc and I got an error message saying that the track had either been deleted or re-named. Ok fine, so I popped the discs in and tried to rip. The software did a couple of things here. On some of the missing tracks, it showed itself completing the new rip (only it didn't) and on others, it wouldn't even detect the missing tracks in order to start a rip. So, I completely deleted the affected albums and restarted my pc. Then, I began the ripping process over and I was able to restore everything as it originally was before this all started this morning. I went through each track and they all play perfectly again. This is an example of the kind of "housekeeping" you will need to do in order to maintain your collections on your Zune. Its obviously a software problem, but the fact that I've had to re-format with each update is also discouraging. Its just a lot of work. This wasn't an isolated incident either, because the software has done the same thing previously on other books. I went into Settings on my desktop and I thought I had made it so that nothing would be added or taken from my zune with me doing it manually, but that isn't the case. Its either ignoring the settings I made, or I'm misunderstanding my options. Either way, once the software starts to make a syncing change, you can't really stop it. You can hit cancel and it stops, but if you want sync anything else, you have to complete the sync the software last started. It seems to wait in a que. In my example, I hit cancel and then tried to sync the video, but it started the removal up again before the video could start to sync. Other short coming include the following: inaccurate info is regularly displayed on tracks (i.e. their names, whether or not they are really there), inaccurate info is displayed on your zune storage amounts, and extremely slow video syncing. The slow video syncing is strictly limited to the Zune 80. My wife has a 30, and it takes her about 45 seconds to sync a 2 hr video. It takes me 45 minutes to an hour to sync the same video to my 80. I called Zune support a couple of times. Both reps sounded foreign, so it was difficult to communicate with them. The first time, the lady put me on hold to check with a "consultant vendor" about this problem. She came back on the line after about 5 minutes and informed me that microsoft is aware of this slow video syncing problem in the 80 and that it had something to do with a new component that they developed for the 80. She told me they are working on a fix, but that it was a hardware problem. I asked if they would be able to fix it with a software update and she couldn't answer me. There is no time estimate on a fix, and microsoft hasn't even posted this issue on Zune's site. I asked her why they hadn't, and she couldn't that either. I wanted to talk to someone different, so I called back about an hour later and spoke to a guy. He said that they had received a memo about the video problem, that they had been aware of it for some time, and that they were working on a fix. I again asked why nothing was posted on Zune.net about this, and he WOULDN'T answer me. He just gave some general canned response that let away from that question. But, at the end of the call, he did encourage me to always check the website for solutions before calling support. Nice, huh? :-) I've also been disappointed with battery life. I've always had my wireless turned off and that is supposed to help with battery life, but my Zune doesn't seem to get anywhere near the official battery life listings released by microsoft. It does help if you completely turn the unit off vesus putting it into hibernation. There was some problem with the version 2.2 software that prevented reduced power useage when the unit was put into hibernation and I thought that was supposed to be fixed with the 2.3 release last week, but I haven't noticed a difference. In addition, my sister-in-law just got one of the latest generation Ipod Classics for her birthday last month and I was able to look at it today to compare screen resolution with my zune. I have to say that I thought the resolution on the IPOD looked better to me. I was a little crestfallen at this. On the Zune, you can pretty much always see at least a little pixelation, but I couldn't detect any on the IPOD. At this point, I don't know whether to keep the zune and try to ride out the problems or bite the bullet and return it for an ipod. I've put so much work into it so far that I don't really want to go to Apple, but I will if things don't rapidly improve. My window for returning is going to run out soon, so I will wait and see how it behaves in the next week.
*********FINAL
Well, I have had my ZUNE 80 for 5 months now. I decided to stick with my Zune over an IPOD and I am glad that I did. Upon further comparison, I realized that the screen on the Zune was vastly superior to the classic screen. The Classic can't match the crisp and vibrant colors on the ZUNE. Of course, now the ITOUCH is becoming more mainstream, and the screen on it is probably better than my ZUNE, but you still can't get the ITOUCH in an 80 gig version yet. Besides, it'll be a while before the ITOUCH comes down in price.
Anyway, to continue, all of my software problems have been resolved by the updates that Microsoft released. I still love the Zune Marketplace, however I wish they would begin offering audiobooks, movies, and a larger selection of music. I'm sure that will all come in time. I think I will remain a Zune supporter, even in the face of the ITOUCH. I have a feeling that the 3rd Gen Zune will be very similar to an ITOUCH. Also, check out DLO's new 80 gig case. It is excellent. Hope this helps!
Digital camera Review: Almost Excellent
Summary: 4 Stars
This product would get 5 stars except, after having bought the product for the 80gb hard drive for video content, I found that I can't play the Zune 80gb through a PAL TV set. Considering that the Zune 30gb model can do this, it seems that this is a step down in technicality.
I would have thought new versions meant advancement not detractions. Hopefully this can be addressed in firmware updates
Also, does Microsoft want to be any greedier?! how could an AC adaptor not be provided?
Other than these 2 issues the product is great. Good sound, very clean displays and a fairly good screen for video.
Digital camera Review: Alot better than some would have you think.
Summary: 4 Stars
I was slightly scared when I went about purchasing the 2nd Generation 80GB Zune. So many negative reviews were left. But now that I've had the Zune for about a month, I have to say that I'm quite impressed with it. There was many complaints about the software automaticaly syncing, and syncing the same songs over and over until the harddrive was full. This is one of those issues that is a customer problem. Everything to adjust the syncing issues is in the options, there's no excuse to give this a bad review out of your own ineptness. There is one problem with the Zune, but it's not really a problem as long as you're using a decent pair of headphones/stereo system. There's no EQ at all. But this was something I knew, going in. It doesn't change that the Zune has never frozen up on me, it doesn't change that I can put my full collection of music on the Zune and I still have over 50GB that I can use for movies, podcasts, and photographs. And it doesn't change the fact that the pictures I've put on there look FANTASTIC on that glass screen. Besides, the touch controls feel great, and I get no lag scrolling through my music. All in all, I recommend this product to anyone who wants a good, solid media player.