Zune Thoughts: Zune 2.0 and Zune Flash Details Leaked?

"The chances of a Zune Scene editor running into a Microsoft Zune employee in the wild are pretty slim, but recently the stars were aligned and I got the inside scoop on the Zune 2.0 and also the flash based Zune coming out in 2007. I will attempt to preserve the identity of the Microsoft employee, he had no idea I write for Zune Scene, no idea at all. The whole conversation occurred on a business trip, you see, we Zune Scene editors have day jobs and are hard to spot in the wild also. When I asked the guy where he worked he said Microsoft. That got my attention so I asked what he did, the answer was: "Zune". He gave his name and title which I will withhold. So I gave him a barrage of questions and here's what I found out..."

I have to get this out of the way up front: I think it's quite dishonest to not disclose that you write for a Web site covering a product the person is telling you about, but by the same token this Microsoft employee should know that we live in an era of citizen journalism where almost nothing is off the record, and anything you say can end up on some blog somewhere. It's sad that you can't have a conversation about a piece of technology with someone without worrying it will end up online, but that's the world we live in for better or worse.

Moralizing aside, what you really care about is what's coming next for the Zune right? A few key pieces of information were gleaned from this conversation (along with my speculation):

• The second generation Zune product, along with a flash memory-based Zune, will be sold later this year
• The 2nd gen Zune will look similar to the first generation Zune, but it will be thinner (if you recall reading our Zune Deep Dive article, there's not much space to be had - so they must have gone to integrated components or else switched to smaller versions of the current components)
• The flash-based Zune will be 3" tall by 1.25" wide and 0.25" thick (only the dimensions were given, not the orientation, so that's my speculation that it will be a tall, narrow, thin Nano-like device)
  
• The flash-based Zune will be video-capable and the screen will cover 75% of the front. I'm not sure what kind of video you'd be able to view on a screen that would be 2.25 inches tall and perhaps 1 inch wide (figure a loss of 0.125 inches on either side). That's an aspect ratio of 2.25:1, which is screwy. Some detail here, or my interpretation, is wrong.
• The flash-based Zune will have WiFi and have a double-shot colour in the moulding like the current Zune does
• The flash-based Zune will "beat the competition" which to mean means 12 GB or 16 GB worth of storage
• In the 2007 holiday season, 2.4 million next-generation Zunes will be fabricated, with about 66% of them being flash-based units (1.59 million units)
• A new building in Dao Min, China, is being built for Zune assembly, right next to the Xbox 360 building

And there you have it - reactions? Are you excited or underwhelmed by what you've read?