Zune info

His is an excellent video demonstrating the Zune 2.5 software and demonstrating how to get your friends playlist on your Zune from the Zune Social.

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Looking for places that sell Microsoft Zunes? Microsoft has deals with 19 Major retailers to sell Zunes and Zune related products. Off course you best online bet is through Amazon.com. The biggest chains that sell Zunes are Wal-mart, Best Buy, K-Mart, Target, Toys R Us, Sears and Radio Shack. Here is a look at all of them. Recently Game Stop stopped selling Zunes!

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Is there a Zune Phone and Zune Touch coming in the near future? The Zune phone is unlikely anytime soon, but a Zune touch is probably around the corner.

Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s president for entertainment and devices says Microsoft “doesn’t have any plans to make phones,” due to the large Windows Mobile products on the market already. They likely do not want to compete with phones that are already using their software. But there is wind that a Zune Touch may be announced soon with product release likely in November/December time frame just in time for Christmas.

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“Microsoft is offering an extended warranty service on Zune devices to the US and Canada for $59.95. And since my last check the USD-CAN dollar ratio is about the same so not much calculating needs to be done to figure out the difference.” – Adam Stafford, Got Zune?

I think this is good news for Zune owners. I don’t really plan to take advantage of this plan since it is a bit expensive at $59.95 but I think being able to extend a manufacturer’s warranty directly with the manufacturer is always a good option to have. I wouldn’t recommend this for a Zune 4/8 player since this is a good portion of the price. But if you have a Zune 30/80 then it may be a good deal! Especially since the HDD has a higher chance of going bad than a flash drive.

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"Those early termination fees (ETFs) that consumers pay for switching cell phones in mid-contract are a great deal, an attorney for AT&T told the Federal Communications Commission yesterday. "ETF-backed term contracts give customers the ability to lower their monthly charges and upfront handset costs in exchange for their promise to pay monthly charges for the life of the contract or alternatively to pay the ETF in lieu of the remaining charges," Seamus C. Duffy explained to the FCC. Not only that, but "the overwhelming popularity of these rate plans has fueled the tremendous increase in wireless penetration, usage, and technical innovation documented by the [FCC's] annual reports on wireless competition."

Right. It is such a great deal for consumers, I am waiting for the online petition so my utility companies, cable bill and NNTP service fee implement an ETF. And I am sure those of you paying monthly fees for acces to subscription sites, music sites and many more are also excited about ETFs everywhere, because according to the AT&T attorney, it is a good thing for us. No, not just a good thing, but a "Great Deal!" In fact, I think Jason may be working on an ETF program for Thoughts Media subscribers, because he surely wouldn’t want to cheat you out of a great deal.

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Looking for more details on the iHome Z9 Clock Radio Zune dock? Harvey from Zunerama has published a video overview of the device that gives you a good look at all of the features. Worth checking out!

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Another week and another Zune Marketplace freebie that you can download, play back, burn to a CD, and sync to your Zune device. A Zune account is required to download the free content. Clicking on any of the links below will automatically launch the Zune software and take you to the artist’s page, so please ensure that the software is installed on your PC.

Title: Katskills
Artist: The Orb
Genre: Dance/Electronic
Length: 5:55

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Today is June 13th, and that’s the official day the Zune launches in Canada. So it’s contest time! The fine folks on Microsoft Canada’s Zune team sent me a black Zune 4 with one of the new Zune Originals designs on the back (pictured below) - a Meomi design called "Percussion". Meomi is the talented duo of Vicki Wong (based out of Vancouver) and Michael Murphy (based out of Los Angeles). OK, so that’s half Canadian. No matter, the artwork rocks!

So how can you win this Zune? First off, because this contest is to celebrate the launch of the Zune in Canada, I’m going to limit this contest to Canadians living in Canada (none of that "I’m living abroad" or "I was born in Canada" stuff). I’m not going to check passports, but the shipping address must be a Canadian address. Yeah, I don’t normally limit contests, but as the Zune launches in new markets I’m going to try my best to get a Zune from the respective Microsoft team in that local market and we’ll repeat this process for the residents of that country.

The rules are simple: post a message to this discussion thread telling me a song you like by a Canadian artist (look at me honouring CANCON!). It can be any song, any genre, but it must be by a Canadian artist (or an artist generally acknowledged to be Canadian even if they live outside Canada today). One post per person allowed, and the winner will be picked randomly from all the entries. If it’s your first post to our forums, it might not appear right away - please allow 24 hours for your post to appear. The contest will run for seven days, ending on June the 20th at 10 AM (GMT -7).

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"The Zune music player and brand has finally arrived onto Canadian soil almost two years after it first hit store shelves in the U.S. And yet, we are the first foreign market for the Zune, possibly affecting where and when it hits next. The first-generation Zune was an example of poor taste in colours and style. The brown one was especially my favourite to pick on because it resembled the kind of human waste that attracts large numbers of flies. The "three plays or three days" policy for sharing music on the original Zune was also laughable."

Well the first "Canadian" review of the Zune is now in, and despite the bandwagon-jumping-Microsoft-trashing quote above, reviewer Ted Kritsonis ends up liking the Zune a fair bit. He gave it an 8.5 out of 10, and that’s without the inclusion of the Zune marketplace (which has yet to launch in Canada). I find it irritating when reviewers mention that the Zune can’t play DRM-protected iTunes, but don’t mention the reason why: Apple won’t license their ironically-named "FairPlay" DRM to other companies. Place the blame in the right place Kritsonis - I’m sure the Zune team would love to license Apple’s DRM because it would mean removing one more barrier to an iPod owner switching to the Zune. But, surprise surprise, Apple wouldn’t allow that because they’re the 900 pound gorilla in the media player market and they use their weight to do monopolistic things such as trademark the shape of their players.

All in all, the Zune fares quite well in this review - but the lack of Zune Pass being immediately available in Canada makes the Zune a cool digital media player, but ultimately not that radically different from competing products from Samsung, Creative, SanDisk, etc. The Zune desktop software is sure a lot better than having to use Windows Media Player 11 to sync though!

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"The ZN9 is the world’s first Zune clock radio, scheduled to be released July 2008. iHome, the venerable maker of iPod and other audio accessories, sent Zunerama a review unit to test out this week. With a boatload of features - including Zune adapter plates, gradual wake and sleep settings, separate weekday/weekend alarm times, multiple dimmer settings - we found a lot to like in the ZN9. And its $99 price tag doesn’t hurt the wallet much either."

Harvey from Zunerama has cranked out a fast review of the iHome ZN9, a product we’ve been watching for a while now. Overall, he gives it solid marks and has no real complaints. I have a question though: do you program it to play specific playlists, or does it simply play a random shuffle all the songs on your Zune? Because there’s certainly music on my Zune that I wouldn’t necessarily want to wake up to…and some music on my Zune would probably lull me back to sleep rather than waking me up. Anyone know how this works?

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"Robbie Bach is the president of the multibillion-dollar Entertainment & Devices Group at Microsoft. The group is closing in on a big fiscal year end on June 30. The company has projected that the group will be profitable this year for the first time since its inception in 2005. One of the products that isn’t profitable yet is the Zune media player. A challenger to Apple’s iPod, the Zune is so far a quixotic attempt to unseat Apple in making cool music devices that capture the buzz among consumers.The Zune is just one of many products within Bach’s domain, where the common theme is “connected entertainment.” VentureBeat was part of a small group of reporters that recently got to quiz Bach about all of his businesses, from Zune to the Xbox 360. This edited transcript is the first of several parts and focuses just on the Zune business."

This is a great interview with Robbie Bach that goes pretty deep on the Zune; namely, how they see the Zune’s position in the market against the iPod and iPhone. Bach drills on the "connected entertainment" point quite a bit, and while I think that’s nice in theory, I continue to believe that Microsoft has fallen short in achieving the synergy they can/should achieve with Windows Mobile, Xbox, Windows, and the Zune. I should be able to purchase a song, a TV show, or a movie and watch it on my Windows Mobile smartphone, my Zune, my Xbox, and my PC. It’s all the same family of products, it’s all similar DRM. Why can’t it all work together? Licensing? Make it work Microsoft! Apple beat you to the punch with the synergy of computer + phone + living room. Don’t let them get too far ahead!

I also think that the VentureBeat reported nailed the right term for the launch of games on the Zune: "timid". As Yoda would say, "Do or do not, there is no try!". Right now games on the Zune seem like an experiment, and I think that sends a lot of mixed messages about how seriously Microsoft is taking this. I enjoyed reading the interview, and I found Bach’s response to the issue of GameStop not selling the Zune any more to be utterly priceless:

"It’s not like they sell iPods either. GameStop saw it as a place to expand. We tried. It hasn’t gone as well as they’d like so they decided to stop selling them. It doesn’t say a lot. It was a channel expansion opportunity and it didn’t work out. It was a good thing to try. But it’s not called GameStop for nothing. It’s not called MusicStop. We have good traction with Best Buy, Circuit City and elsewhere."

It’s so true - I grew very weary of blog after blog, media outlet after media outlet, making a huge deal about this when GameStop announced they’d stop selling the Zune. Were the same blogs and media outlets making an equally big deal out of GameStop selling the Zune when they first started because GameStop was such a huge an influential retail channel? No. Some people can be remarkably hypocritical when it comes to talking about Microsoft and it truly gets tiring sometimes. At any rate, check out the interview for more Q&A.

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One day ahead of the official launch, the Zune originals site is now live and Canadians can order a customized Zune for no added charge. All six of the new Canadian-artist designs are now live as well, so you can go check them out (I dig the Meomi stuff). Also, the Zune Originals site is also selling the Microsoft-branded accessories so you can pick up a dock, car pack, leather case, etc. to go with your new Zune. Nice! And speaking of Zune Originals, keep your eye on the site tomorrow…

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Agent 18, the makers of three different Zune cases, has updated their one and only case for the Zune 4/8 players: the Zune Scorpion Kit. It’s not available in grey, brown, and pink (pictured above). The kit sells for $24.95, and is geared toward using the Zune on the go: it comes with a belt clip and an armband, allowing you attach the Zune to your belt or arm.

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Yesterday and today, you may have received one of more email messages that looked something like this:

And by "one or more", I mean that some of you may not have received any - and some might have received hundreds. A few weeks ago, we installed a plug-in called vBSEO - it’s a search engine optimization plug-in that does a lot of interesting things. It changes the URLs of our forum threads to match the title of the first post - it makes the URLs a bit longer, which makes them a bit harder to link to, but it also makes them keyword heavy and that helps out with the search engines in a big way. One of the other features it has is based around linkbacks - people who use blogging software are familiar with this term. A linkback is a way for you to tell when someone has linked to your post, and link to their mention of your post. It creates a nice web of links between sites that are linking to each other, raising awareness of who’s talking about your content, and the links back and forth help out with the search engine rankings.

What I didn’t know, however, was that the developers at vBSEO decided to have the "Email Notifications on Incoming LinkBacks" be turned on by default. This program has easily over 100 different options, and I didn’t look at everyone one of them. So that’s why you received all those messages - if you’d ever subscribed to a thread in our forums, vBulletin treated the linkback like a new post in the thread and "helpfully" updated you about the new post in the thread. The problem is that it’s not really new content in the thread.

I’ve now turned that "feature" off and no one should be getting an email from our system about linkbacks/talkbacks again. I’m also going to be contacting the developers of vBSEO and suggesting in fairly strong terms that it’s completely idiotic to have that feature turned on by default.

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Amazon.ca is listing the Zune for pre-sale, showing the release date as tomorrow. Prices are at a slight premium over the US prices: the red Zune 8 is $179.00 CAD (versus $164 USD), and the two Zune 80 models are $259.99 CAD each (versus between $238 and $249 USD). What I find most interesting here is that Amazon only has the red Zune 8 - no other colours, and no Zune 4 models. Will they be getting more, or did they chose to go with the most popular models of the Zune and leave it at that?

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"Microsoft Corp. today announced that 4GB, 8GB and 80GB Zune digital music players and an extensive line-up of accessories will be available in Canadian stores starting June 13, 2008. "We’re thrilled to be offering a truly unique way for Canadians to discover new music and share it with their friends," said Craig Tullett, Group Manager, Zune Canada. "With a variety of players, customization options and wireless capabilities Zune offers a mobile social experience.""

Retailers lined up to sell the Zune include the who’s-who of electronics stores in Canada: Best Buy, Future Shop, Wal-Mart, Amazon.ca, HMV (select stores), The Source by Circuit City (select stores). Two things are interesting about that list: first, London Drugs isn’t included. London Drugs is a major Canadian retailer with several stores in most major cities - it could be that Microsoft just couldn’t convince them to come aboard. The second interesting thing is that Amazon.ca is listed. Amazon.ca does not sell electronics in the Canadian market - they sell books, CDs, DVDs, software…and that’s about it. No electronics, no memory cards, no MP3 players, etc. I’ll talk more about Amazon.ca in another post, but it’s very interesting to see this change and I hope it’s a sign of things to come.

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“PDASmart, the leading developer of handheld performance upgrades and accessories, announced today the immediate availability of an acrylic lens replacement for the 80gb Zune MP3 Player. The PDASmart upgrade is for the person who has cracked their glass or scratched it. This part was developed after many of the Zune users out there complained that they cracked their glass lens and cannot use or see the lcd behind the lens. Pdasmart decided to create a replacement that could take the abuse and not crack again causing the end-user another bad day. Being acrylic plastic, the part will withstand more pressure and abuse unlike the glass originally in the Zune. "After hearing customers complain about broken glass, we decided to move forward with the development of the Zune 80gb Plastic Lens replacement to help customers regain the use of their MP3 player", said CEO Trey Mattox of Optimistic Enterprises.”

This is great news for at least Zune 80 owners. I could have used this with my Zune 30 when I scratched the screen. I guess it’s not economical for Microsoft to provide this service so it’s good to see that someone out there is. You can do it yourself for $50 or have PDASmart do it for $65 which includes parts and labor. My only complaint is that it’s acrylic and not glass. They try and sell it off that it will stand up to punishment better than glass will but acrylic is very susceptible to scratching so only do this if you have no choice. It’s better than the alternative at least of buying a completely new Zune if you broke your screen.

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If you’re like me, a major part of travel packing involves making sure you have all your power requirements met to charge your devices on the road. Our typical travel pack usually includes two phones, two MP3 players, two digital cameras, a video camera, two GPS units (one for geocaching and one for use in the car), and a laptop. Some of these items have their own rechargeable batteries which charge either via USB or AC adapter and others use rechargeable AA or AAA batteries. If you are like me, you often find yourself crawling around on the floor of a hotel room looking for extra outlets to charge your gear. Even if you find enough, you usually end up with devices all over the room and perhaps even one or two in the bathroom. This is a less than ideal situation, and until hotels figure out that they really need to provide more than one outlet on the desk, Belkin has stepped up with a solution to this common travellers dilemma with the Belkin Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger. So how did they solve the problem?

In recent years, I’d taken to adding a strip outlet to my travel gear. I really like to keep all my electronics on the desk when staying in a hotel. This makes it less likely that I will accidentally leave something in the hotel. The strip outlet worked, but even though I was using one of the smaller ones I could find, it was still on the bulky side and didn’t offer any type of surge protection. Belkin felt my pain and they developed a compact surge protector designed specifically for your travel needs.

The Belkin features a plug that rotates 360 degrees so that it will work with even the most awkwardly placed outlet. Unfortunately the plug does not fold flat into the unit, but they have included a protective cover to keep the prongs from getting bent or scratching up your other gear. The front of the unit features three grounded outlets. As an added bonus, the side of the unit features two USB plugs for charging your USB enabled devices. The outlets are spaced to allow power bricks, but I’d really like to see some more space between the plugs to handle larger bricks since there is plenty of room on either end. I was not able to use the third outlet due to the size and orientation of the two plugs I did use. But, as you can see, I was able to charge my Asus Eee, phone, MP3 player, and GPS all at once.

In addition to being more compact that the strip outlet I was using, this item also features 918 Joules of Surge Protection and a $75,000 connected equipment warranty. Upon my first use of this product in a hotel, I quickly realized the value of this. Apparently there was a problem with the outlet I was using and the surge protector kept cutting off my power. Since this was my first time using this product, I thought maybe I had a faulty one, but I tried another outlet and it worked fine. Who knows how many times I may have been plugging my devices into less than safe outlets in the past.

So, in conclusion, this is a great little product for the road warrior as it offers both convenience and protection for charging all your toys. You can pick one up for $19.99 at Amazon.com. [Affiliate]

Chris Gohlke is a Contributing Editor for Digital Media Thoughts. He loves Sci-Fi and loves to get his hands on real-life tech gadgets. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, USA with his wife and three cats.

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This is a round-up review of seven Zune 80 cases from Incipio. Included in this review are the black leather kickstand case ($24.99 USD), the clear dermaSHOT case ($12.99 USD), the black leather wallet case ($24.99 USD), the black leather flip case ($19.99 USD), the ECO|case canvas case ($19.99 USD), the VERTIGO black leather holster case ($19.99 USD), and theDUKE raw leather wallet case ($29.99 USD).

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“Are you ready to start programming games for your Zune? All you need is the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP and any model of the Zune media device. Follow these instructions to get started with your first Zune game. Once you’ve done that, try our first Zune Mini-Game, Alien Game!”

If you are looking for a complete guide to getting started with Zune game development then you don’t need to look any further than the XNA website. I’m pretty excited about being able to play games on my Zune but being able to easily make games is almost as exciting for me.

There’s a lot of information about how this works out there (that Adam was nice enough to send my way!) and between the tips for all of you potential developers and the games that are available for download, there’s something for everyone already and this stuff isn’t even live yet.

I’m pretty busy but I I’d really like to try and make a game of some sort for the Zune. I’ve always been a huge fan of turn based strategy games so I’ll have to see what it’s like to develop for XNA. At the very least you can expect a truly awesome “Hello World” application from me!

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