Zune Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"Microsoft last night announced (officially) the Zune HD, even though the device won't be available for several months. While the product itself looks nice, it's the "platform" behind it that is finally coming to fruition and may be Microsoft's best chance at capturing a bigger slice of those home entertainment dollars. We spoke with Brian Seitz, the group marketing manager for Zune, about the new product and Microsoft's larger strategic ambitions. Here's everything you need to know..."

Brian Seitz fills in a few of the blanks that we've been wondering about. First, the connector on the Zune HD is the same as other Zunes, so that means all those Zune accessories out there right now will work. Excellent news! That's what I was hoping Microsoft would do, but you never know sometimes with these big corporations. The Web browser is based on IE6, but unlike the browser in Windows Mobile 6.5 (which it has to be related to), it probably won't have Flash support - but Seitz says it's possible. They're still working on the software it seems - which isn't surprising given the Fall release date. Read more...

"After doing some digging, we can confirm that the release this fall will be international . While we were not able to get a list of countries that the Zune will ship to, we can confirm that it will be shipping to: Australia, China, and Europe. A company representative told me that there will be far more countries that the Zune will be shipping to. Stay tuned for more, including specs and pictures (We've seen the internal video!). I'll leave our readers with this: It's slim and you won't need a D-Pad. Feel free to speculate."

We pretty much knew that new hardware was coming this year, but the interwebs are blowing up over a single tweet from Brian Seitz where he confirmed that there's new hardware in the pipeline. People seem pretty excited about a new Zune, so that's good to see. The above quote from this Neowin article has more specifics than I've seen elsewhere - though I disagree with the use of "confirm" when they can't quote their source. At any rate, if this news is accurate, I'd say it's very big news indeed. Not only does it seem to firm up the rumour about an iPod Touch-like Zune (slim and no D-Pad), but it seems the Zune is finally ready to bust out of the confines of North America. Take this all with a large grain of salt mind you, because none of this is confirmed, but I think it's worth getting excited about! I wish I could add my own speculation into the mix based on what I learned spending two days with the Zune team, but I can't...I do hope though to be among the first to be able to provide you all with accurate information when the time comes.