Zune'd

Layla got me a Zune for Christmas. Yes, it's brown.

I've wanted one of these for a while—the battery life, capacity, and build quality of my mobiBLU DAH-1500i leave a good deal to be desired...and come to think of it, the FM reception on it sucks, too. The Zune has much better...well, everything. And even though it's a lot bigger than the inch-cube DAH, I don't regularly encounter situations where I can't handle a large, drive-based digital audio player¹.

I'm most interested in the Wi-Fi, which offers only a wee bit of functionality at the moment, but offers lots more in terms of potential. Since all the appropriate hardware is in the box, it's presumably a matter of a firmware update to enable new scenarios.

Speaking of software—that's the one point where the Zune is currently really lacking. The desktop software is a little clunky and has actually only been released for Vista for a few days. I'm hopeful that the library management software (and the device firmware) will make large strides as the Zune team moves further through the product cycle. I understand that the 1.2 software update (the aforementioned few-day-old update) includes lots of fixes, which indicates to me that the shoddy software is much more a product of premature release (ohh!) than it is of poor design.

But for now, I'm still syncing loads of music onto it so I can actually, you know, use it.

¹ I'm starting my 20/20 workouts soon, but those are all done when I'm attached to a device that has a platform or pocket for audio players (e.g., treadmills). So even while working out, the Zune should work just fine.