Microsoft Zune Music Player

Mike Agerbo: Well, much too Apple – Microsoft has decided to get in to the digital music player market. They did sell last year in the US and finally coming into Canada now, they the ZonePlayer. This is a digital video and music player from Microsoft that basically designed to take on Apple’s iPod. Lindsay Smith: This is really, really cool. I mean it’s got a lot of features, you can see music or you can listen to music on it, you can watch videos, pictures, radio even – I mean, that’s definitely something that’s new that the iPod doesn’t have. And I think the kicker with this is that they’re really going with the whole social media theme. The social media such a huge thing right now and the ability to be able to share music with friends is something that they’re trying to integrate into these devices. One of the ways that they are doing that is with wireless capabilities. So when you take your ZonePlayer into a wireless area, you can actually transfer files back and forth really easily from your computer and from device to device so we can share music and rock it out together. Mike Agerbo: This is kind of cool like the Apple iPod, they don’t have Wi-Fi capability or some of the newer ones were starting to have that with the Touch for example. But the Zone right of the bat even with the smaller flash player, I’ve got the 80 gig version which is like a small hard drive in here. You’ve got the – Lindsay Smith: This is the 8 gig and it’s the solid state and it is pink, become in different colors. Mike Agerbo: You must love that? Lindsay Smith: I do. Mike Agerbo: But the Wi-Fi capabilities – a lot more advanced than Apple’s. So for example, like you’re saying from a social networking aspect, we can actually share playlist and even songs for that matter. And when you do get into your home and your Wi-Fi network, the nice thing is you don’t have to be hooked in to actually sync up and download more videos and music. You can actually send it over to Wi-Fi network. Lindsay Smith: It’s really, really convenient and say for example Mike wanted to listen to a song that I had on my player, I could send it to him and you will be able to listen to that song for up to three days for free to sample it, which is a really cool neat technology that we haven’t seen before being able to transfer songs back and forth and share it, and I’ll have to pay for it. Mike Agerbo: I love that part. So right now, we’re on the home screen. You can’t customize this here with your own background pictures and textures. If you want, you can actually load it to the unit. It’s got a little touch pads, you can actually use this is a cursor tactile pad or it’s actually touch-enabled as well. So you can see, I’ve got music videos, very easy to navigate through here if I wanted to go into the videos for example, just click on that. And up in the top there if I go sideways, I’ve got different options right now. I can scroll down here and click on it. Beautiful screen on this unit as well here, but the larger one obviously in the big unit but even on the 1 point inch – screen here, you can see it’s pretty nice as well. Lindsay Smith: Yeah, you can navigate down on the pictures there. I have to say that one of the things that I really do like – this is the touchpad that you’re talking about there. The grip on it is a lot easier to navigate I find than the iPod that I have. My friend with the iPod, somebody’s got stuck, it’s hard to like put it on the exact setting that you want. You kind of fiddling back and forth. But this one, it seems to just catch it right away because of the texture of the pad. It’s just great. Mike Agerbo: And as far as the headphones, did actually come with some pretty – headsets with this here. I supposed those cheap plastic ones that you might get with the Apple iPod. But you can see, it fits right in here and it cancels out all the noise around you and it’s got some pretty decent base pumping out of these little headphones. It’s a classic going round. Lindsay Smith: Yes. It is actually – Mike put it in because I was talking to him earlier and you can’t draw a thing when he has got that in plain. Mike Agerbo: No, but it’s a good thing because sometimes you want to drawn out. It’s Microsoft Zone coming into Canada, they’ve got the hard drive versions, I think a 30 and 80 gigs so you can dump all sorts of photos, music, pictures. I think like 25,000 songs and pictures and 240 hours of video. And as far as video, it’ll actually take the TV recorded shows off of your media center played directly on here but also things like Mpeg4 and Windows media files as well. Male: If you thought that was cool, then you should also check out these.