A Week With the Zune HD 5 Things I Love (and 5 Reasons I'm Keeping My iPod)

Can Microsoft's new player replace "the funnest iPod ever"? I
took a week to find out for myself.

Is Apple unstoppable? If it is, the Zune HD has long appeared
to be the best shot at unseating the MP3-player kingpin.
Knowing that, when a Zune landed at PopSci HQ, we had to see
if such a thing could actually be true.

For a week, I split my commute between a Zune HD and a brand
new iPod touch (my fourth Apple player). These are the high-
(and low) lights of my week with the Zune HD.

Naturally as an iPod devotee, I felt predisposed to Hate
(with a capital "h") the Zune, but I decided to give it
a fighting chance nonetheless. I loaded 'er up with about
2 gigs of my most-played music, downloaded whatever apps the
Zune Marketplace had to offer, subscribed to a podcast or
two, and got myself a two-week ZunePass to make sure I was
getting the full sha-bang.

After five days' worth of go-rounds on the NYC subway, I
realized there are a few spots where the Zune HD does in fact
out-class the "funnest iPod ever." But don't check me off as
a convert: For every nugget I came to love about the Zune,
there was another one tipping the scales back to the touch.

Five Things I Love:

1. Music Discovery: The Zune HD would feel like nothing
without a ZunePass, a subscription service that allows full
access to Zune Marketplace features and music suggestions.
With my trail ZunePass, I chose to subscribe to so-called
"channels" in the Market; once I added the Billboard channel
to my queue, it automatically synced the top 20 singles with
a list in my collection and on the Zune every time I
connected it. A ZunePass also lets you create SmartDJ
playlists, which work a lot like Genius lists on iTunes --
except you can keep the songs you don't own on your player
for a month without purchasing them. A ZunePass is $14.99
a month, and includes 10 permanent song downloads.

2. Collection Loading: This has always been the great
pain-in-the-ass of iTunes, and kudos to the Zune desktop
software for getting it right. There is no need to manually
add music to the library; any music, video, pics,
whatahaveyou that you load into specified folders
automatically shows up in your collection ("Documents/Music"
for example). Huzzah!

3. Shortcuts: A left-to-right swipe from the home screen
brings you to a secondary menu where you see a quick-glance
of your collection activity. The best of this menu are the
"pins," which are basically library bookmarks you create on
the fly. I, for example, cannot get the song "Say Hey" by
Michael Franti out of my head, so a press-and-hold on that
track creates a shortcut. This screen also tracks what's
currently playing, what you've listened to or watched most
recently, and what's been newly added to the player.

4. HD Radio: I know, I know, they finally added an FM tuner
to the new iPod nanos, but a) it's not high-def and b)
there's no one-click way to add a song on the radio to your
cart in the music store. 'nuf said.

5. Text Input: At first glance the keyboard might look the
same (even smaller) than on the iPod, but this one for
whatever reason is a whole lot easier to type on.

Five Reasons to Stick to my iPod:

1. Games: Sure, they've only just gotten started (and the
Zune HD will support 3D gaming), but the selection of
downloads in the Marketplace is slim (and that's being
generous). The glory of the iTunes App Store is choice (one
word scramble game? Please, how about 40?) Zune users have
nine apps total (seven games, a weather app, and a
calculator).

2. Social Networking: It all comes back to apps. While the
Zune HD has its own dedicated social component through the
Marketplace where you and friends can share playlists and
the like, it's severely limited. Facebook on the touch, runs
circles around it, and doesn't require that everyone you
connect with be running the same hardware to see each other.

3. No-Look Controls: The reason I didn't buy a first-gen iPod
touch was simple: I didn't want a music player I had to look
at to adjust the volume, controls the second- and third-gen
models have added to the left-hand side. The Zune HD's
left-hand key brings up an on-screen volume control, but
doesn't directly adjust the output.

4. Daylight-Friendly: So neither OLED screen is perfect in
bright sunlight, but at least I can still see the iPod
walking down the street. The Zune forced me to pull over into
the shade nearly every time I needed to do anything -- very
irritating (see above re: volume controls).

5. Longer Battery Life: Microsoft and Apple both rate their
player's battery life around the same 33-36 hours of music
playback, but they were far from neck-and-neck for me. Using
both the iPod and Zune more-or-less equal amounts over
a week, the iPod needed 1 recharge to the Zune's 3.