Zune Thoughts: Not a Fair Fight

"I love Apple Computer's video iPods, but they have their annoyances... Apple is surely mulling whether to remedy some, if not all, these limitations, and now it has a fresh incentive to do so: Microsoft's new Zune player. I've been playing with the music, picture and video player for the past week, and I can't recommend it. The $250 Zune has too many drawbacks compared to a video iPod with the same price and 30-gigabyte storage capacity. But the Zune does offer a few advantages over iPods."

Twin Cities reporter Julio Ojeda-Zapata weighs in on the iPod vs. Zune fight. All though overall, his opinion is that the iPod wins hands down, he does a nice job of pointing out some of the iPod's frustrations and the Zune's strong points. (He even tried the "key" test on his loaner Zune, and was quite pleased with the hardware's durability. I'm not brave enough to try that!) One of the negatives that are pointed out in this article, amongst others, is the Zune Marketplace is currently limited to 2 million tracks, compared to 3.5 million on iTunes Store. Yes, Zune Marketplace does have some ground to make up. Most of these articles never mention that when iTunes Store first launched, it did so with a paltry 200,000 tracks, and only reach 1 million tracks some 16 months into existence. Zune appears to have a nice springboard launching with 2 million. As long as they continue to add content, this shouldn’t be an issue. Personally, I’ve yet to have an issue find a song I was looking for on either service. Maybe I’m just too main stream!