Zune and Zune Marketplace on ZuneInsights.com

2006-11-05

The Internet has been flooding with rumors, the secrecy has been massive and the speculations wild. Name such as Project Argo, Zune, Alexandria and Pyxis has been circling between bloggers and journalists. Finally Microsoft has raised the curtain and reviled their plans for a portable music player and an online music store and named it all Zune.

Zune

According to Microsoft Zune is a concept that consists of several parts, a portable music player and an online portal for downloading music and other content to the player. It all sounds a lot like Apples concept with the iPod products and the iTunes Music Store.

Microsoft is planning on releasing the first Zune Player in the United States November 14 and a few months later the rest of the world. The price of the first Zune player will be $249.99 when it hits the market in the United States.

Toshiba will manufacture the first Zune Player for Microsoft.

Zune’s official website is found here:: Zune.net.

Zune functionality

So far, Microsoft has only reveled details about the first Zune Player. The player will get a hard drive of 30 GB, a 3 inch LCD screen and a FM-radio tuner. According to Microsoft the hard drive will be able to store 7500 songs or up to 100 hours of video. The Zune Player will also be equipped with support for wireless LAN (WLAN) and this is quite interesting. The support for WLAN will make it possible to connect several players and share music files. It will be possible to listen to one of you friends music files up to three times before you have to buy the song at the Zune Marketplace (more information about the Zune Marketplace further down).

Not surprisingly the Zune Player will be equipped with Microsoft’s DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection to prevent users to copy music out of Microsoft’s control.

The Zune Player will support the common music file formats, MP3, AAC and WMA as well as the WMV, H.264 and MPEG4 video formats. It will also be possible to view photos in JPEG format.

The first Zune Player will weigh in at 5.6 ounces and be 4.4 x 2.4 x 0.58 inches (11 x 6 x 1.5 cm) in size. The battery will last 12hr for audio and 3.5 hr for video. At first, the Zune Player will ship in three different colors, black, white and brown.

Microsoft will include a number of accessories in the box, a USB cable that will be used to sync the Zune player with the computer as well as charge the Zune player, of course a pair of headphones and a soft pouch.

It will be possible to connect the Zune Player to an Xbox (by USB) and stream music, video and pictures to a television and sound system. It is also said that there will be some integration between the Zune Player and the Xbox live services but unfortunately we know very little about this at the moment.

A number of sites have already tried out the new Zune player. Two of these sites can be found here: Gizmodo och Engadget.

Zune Marketplace

There are still a lot of questions regarding the Zune Marketplace that has not yet been answered. But- we do know a few things. Zune Marketplace will become Microsoft’s answer to Apples iTunes Music Store and provide the users with the possibility to order and download music, video and other kinds of entertainment. It will be possible to buy and download music both by paying for each song and by paying a flat rate every month, a ZunePass, that will give you access to the entire library of music and video. It will cost 99 cents to buy an individual song and a ZunePass will cost $14.99 per month.

Zune vs. iPod

Today iPod dominates the portable music players market and people now discuss if this era will come to an end with the introduction of Zune. We think that if and how Zune will compete against iPod is still too early to determine, even though it’s quite likely. It’s too early to say how the battle between iPod and Zune will take place.

ZuneInsights.com

We will continue to try to keep this webpage updated with more information and details around the Zune Player and the Zune Marketplace. Please visit us again soon.

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