Wednesday, September 12, 2007
1st Generation Zune Enhancements Coming?
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Zune Talk" @ 07:00 AM
This is from a post Cesar Menendez, a member of the Zune team, did on the 7th of this month:
"A while ago I had said the recent announcement doesn’t change any of our plans – it doesn’t. We’re really confident about the lineup we’re building, and to the enhancements we’re bringing to gen 1 Zunes (no specifics to share right now). Until then, today is Friday, and my next post will contain a bunch of free music."
It baffles me slightly that Cesar would be talking about enhancements being made to the first generation Zune products when we're on the eve of the second generation products being released. Unless, and this is a very large "unless", the Zune team is keeping the core hardware so much the same that when the second generation Zunes come out the features will be 100% backward compatible with the older Zunes. In an ideal world, this would mean that whatever new features and enhancements coming out for the Zune 2.0 devices could be applied to the Zune 1.0 devices. This is certainly possible to do - Microsoft controls the hardware end to end, so if Zune 2.0 has enhancements to the menu system, more on-board codecs, etc., it might be backward compatible with the hardware we have here.
That's a highly speculative guess, but seeing as how the first generation Zunes have received no significant firmware updates since launch, and we're all wondering what the Zune team is up to (since it's clearly not firmware upgrades), maybe this is it? Talk about wishing on a star...I almost feel silly writing this up. But hey, if I'm right, you heard it here first.
"A while ago I had said the recent announcement doesn’t change any of our plans – it doesn’t. We’re really confident about the lineup we’re building, and to the enhancements we’re bringing to gen 1 Zunes (no specifics to share right now). Until then, today is Friday, and my next post will contain a bunch of free music."
It baffles me slightly that Cesar would be talking about enhancements being made to the first generation Zune products when we're on the eve of the second generation products being released. Unless, and this is a very large "unless", the Zune team is keeping the core hardware so much the same that when the second generation Zunes come out the features will be 100% backward compatible with the older Zunes. In an ideal world, this would mean that whatever new features and enhancements coming out for the Zune 2.0 devices could be applied to the Zune 1.0 devices. This is certainly possible to do - Microsoft controls the hardware end to end, so if Zune 2.0 has enhancements to the menu system, more on-board codecs, etc., it might be backward compatible with the hardware we have here.
That's a highly speculative guess, but seeing as how the first generation Zunes have received no significant firmware updates since launch, and we're all wondering what the Zune team is up to (since it's clearly not firmware upgrades), maybe this is it? Talk about wishing on a star...I almost feel silly writing this up. But hey, if I'm right, you heard it here first.
