As expected Microsoft officially announced the Zune personal media player today. The Zune is to be available in time for the holidays and features a 30GB hard drive, wireless connectivity and will come in three colors…brown, black and white.¬ No prices have been announced as yet.
I haven’t seen a complete feature list yet so I’m can’t say if they will offer real competition for Apple’s iPod. Just from looking at the pictures it’s my opinion that they definitely missed the cool factor.¬ Perhaps the features and accompanying applications will make up for that.
What I think was an even bigger announcement was that Creative¬ revealed a wide screen Zen Player today that definitely does capture the cool factor. It features a 4.3″ 16:4 TFT wide screen display. It’s expected that the 30GB edition will be priced at about $299 which puts in directly in line with Apple’s new 30gb Video iPod. A 60gb version may be available for around $399.
I would definitely consider the Creative Zen due to the wide screen and sexy design. Feature wise we’ll have to wait and see.¬
I’ll be interested to see what wireless capabilities the Microsoft Zune has and even more importantly what type battery life you can expect with this feature. Design wise, the Zune to me looks like another iPod want-to-be.
The competitors are catching up and in some cases maybe even passing Apple’s iPod hardware wise. However, when considering the whole media experience of iTunes I believe Apple still has a lead for the time being.
It’s going to get interesting….
technorati tags:microsoft, zune, creative, zen, apple, ipod