Posted on this thread: Gizmodo- Zune vs. iPod: The Final Word On Who Should Get Your Money
I’ve been watching the Zune V. Ipod debate for about a week now, looking to figure out what player is best for me. In the end, it comes down to:
iPod Pro: Proven design, Availability of addons, can use as hardrive, random gimmicks that seem cool to have but are just gimmicks (outlook calendaring, games that suck to play on an iPod.)
iPod Cons: it’s an iPod, needs a case, needs more addon adapters to do what I want it to do.
Zune Pro: It’s new, It’s different, Bigger screen, apparently better sound quality (I haven’t had a chance to listen to them side by side so who knows), has fm tuner (which is a feature I want and will have to pay 50 bucks to get on the flip side).
Zune Con: Unproven, but promising. Doesn’t work as a hd.
I think the biggest thing for me is the lack of hd capability. Otherwise, I’d go zune just to be different from the apple fanbois. And that’s the hard decision for me. New toy or hard drive.
IMHO, I think that zune, as a first offering, is damned good. It took years to get to where Apple is, and the fact that Zune did so well at the get go against iPod is great. People bring up these lame arguments (zune is a knockoff, zune marketplace doesn’t have videos/as much content , zune looks bad, zune doesn’t play itunes drm) but those are all things that Apple worked through. Apple didn’t start with 3 mil tracks on itunes, it didn’t start with a huge variety of movies (besides… 2.5 inc screen + feature length movie = squintfest), Apple didn’t always have hundreds of widgets and wingdings for it. Granted, when you look at the hard facts, I think I’ll concede that the iPod is probably a better player, but not by much. The only thing that has really stopped me from picking up a Zune on launch was that it didn’t use the UMS format and could double as a HD. If Zune had that in 2nd gen, I’d probably be persuaded to switch.
It’s always fun to bash M$, but the amount of bias there is toward iPod v Zune is ridiculous.
