Zune Thoughts: Steve Smith's Zune Wishlist (And Some of Mine)

The Holiday Season may have passed, but Steve Smith still has a few requests for the Zune Team. Two of his three requests have to do with wirelessly syncing while on a dock, and the other is a request for deeper car integration. I'm with him on these, and the two wireless sync requests could (and should) be included in the next update.

On that note, here are a couple things I've been wishing for in the Zune for a while, most of which could be easily implemented:

Music:

• The number-one feature request I get from iPod-owning friends when they use my Zune is for a "view all tracks by artist" feature. It's annoying to have to look through every album by a particular artist just to see what I've got in my collection.
• Bring back the Quick List. Playing another song, album, or artist will erase any playlist you've been working on, which is quite annoying.
• A "remove from now playing" feature would be awesome to have, as would a "remove from list after the song has played" feature.

Games:

• Don't force a restart after quitting out of a personal or community-built game. XNA superhero Michael Klucher has a write-up about why they did it, which basically boils down to securing the code and DRM'd files, but I just don't see why they can't reset the flags without completely rebooting the device. This should definitely be a priority for the XNA team.
• Not really a game, but a simple RSS reader, synced on-the-go or at sync time would be awesome.

Social:

• Allow videos below a certain size to be shared via wifi. I'd love to be able to beam short YouTube videos or music videos to friends.

Misc:

• Add an alarm feature so I can wake to music without having to use a third-party XNA app.

That's what I can think of for now. Do you have any suggestions for the device? Sound off in the comments!