More Zune reviews
13th Nov 2006, 21:38 GMT
Click for PDF of a graphic comparing the Zune, iPod and Sansa Rhapsody. Microsoft plans a series of launch concerts around the country for its new Zune music device today, including one at noon at Seattle's Westlake Plaza. Meanwhile, the reviews of the device continue to come out, in advance of the Tuesday product release. In case you missed it, here's the review by the P-I's Athima Chansanchai from Saturday's paper. And Steven Levy of Newsweek points out a limitation he discovered in the Zune's wireless sharing feature: "What's more, when I tried to send a Rolling Stones song I just bought on the Zune Marketplace to another Zune, I got a message reading, 'Can't receive songs because of rights restrictions.' Huh? Microsoft says that in a minority of cases it was unable to secure artist rights for even this limited form of sharing, and that's the message you get when you try to send songs from those holdouts. Seems to me that when you buy those non-sharable songs from the Zune Marketplace you should be warned about this. But Microsoft says that they have no plans to give you that information, even if it makes you look like an idiot when you waste a friend's time by trying to send a song and getting only that insulting error message." Lastly, when putting together this story on the Zune last week, one of the people I spoke with was Steve Wilson of ABI Research, the company that found a higher-than-expected number of iPod users willing to seriously consider buying a Zune. Wilson said he believes one of the key factors was Microsoft's name recognition. (Survey respondents were told it was a Microsoft product.) But it's worth noting that the Zune team isn't playing up that connection to the parent company in its branding or consumer packaging, aiming instead to give the product an identity of its own in the long run.
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