Microsoft Zune Review

Unique Features

The home screen of the Zune is fully customizable, so you can see any picture or graphic of your choosing as the background, as shown in Figure 8. Although this is a small item, it gives you the feeling that the player is truly your own.

Figure 8: The Zune with personalized home screen.

Although we have seen iPods with wireless functionality, we have not yet seen any that allow you to sync wirelessly like you can with the Zune. If you prefer, you can sync with the included USB cable, but with a few clicks of the mouse you can also set the Zune to sync over your wireless network. You must turn on the wireless in both the software and the device for this to work. Although it is slower than synching over USB, it works well, even for security-enabled wireless networks. We found it very useful when we used a charging device to charge numerous devices in a central location. Using this method we could plug the Zune into our charging device which resides in the living room and it would not only charge, but would also sync with our computer at the other end of the house.

With the Zune you can also share your music with others. You can send a song to any other Zune user wirelessly. They can then play that song three times to see if they like it and can then purchase it if they like. While this is certainly an admirable feature for sharing music, unless you know some other Zune owners, it may go unused, as it did for us.

The Zune also has an excellent built-in FM radio. It supports the Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS) system so that detailed station and song information shows directly on the Zune screen as long as it is supported by the radio station that you are listening to. In fact, you can even tag songs from RBDS stations so you can download them to your Zune.

You’ll find that the Zune has more unique features than most other MP3 players. And its most unique feature may well be the way you can find new music, connect with other music lovers, and listen to music you love. We’ll tell you all about that in the next page.