Zune

As one of my colleagues put it the other day, Microsoft killed the rumors that it's building a Zune phone, but it didn't drive a silver stake through their heart and bury them at a crossroads at midnight. In other words, until Microsoft makes some kind of phone-related announcement, misinformed analysts and news outlets will continue to speculate that there's going to be a Microsoft-built Zune phone, and Microsoft spokespeople will continue going on the record with vehement denials.

This is getting silly. I've been saying since February that the most likely course of action for … Read more

Microsoft blogger Steve Clayton thinks he has the answer to the mystery of president-elect Barack Obama on a treadmill with--gasp--a Microsoft Zune instead of his usual iPod. Microsoft made a special-edition 4GB Zune for the Democratic National Convention. I can imagine Obama wanted to work out, realized he didn't have his iPod, and asked one of his many staffers to borrow their MP3 player.

The funniest part of this story isn't that Obama was using a Zune, but that everybody was so surprised to see one in public! Outside Microsoft, they're still relatively rare beasts.

(Tip courtesy … Read more

Coolfer has an interesting post this morning, responding to Peter Kafka's suggestion that it's getting too hard to buy music because fewer retailers are stocking CDs. I think Kafka's confusing cause and effect--if retailers were still making lots of money on Britney and Rihanna, CDs would be sold front and center. But regardless of the chicken-and-egg question, Coolfer makes the very good point that most music purchasers don't seek out music and aren't willing to sift through the racks at their local record stores, but rather pick up a CD as an impulse buy on … Read more

One more detail about the latest Zune update: the Zune Pass, which costs $14.99 a month, is now going to allow users up to 10 permanent downloads per month. That's in addition to the unlimited downloads that expire if you stop paying your subscription. Think of it like an insurance policy for Zune Pass: if your Zune breaks and you decide to switch to another brand of MP3 player, you'll still get to keep some of the songs you downloaded.

I believe that Microsoft is the first company to offer free permanent downloads alongside unlimited temporary downloads. … Read more

Microsoft is trying to push Zune sales along with a price cut, as CNET's Ina Fried already reported Tuesday, and Donald Bell has the scoop on the firmware update that will deliver bug fixes, three new games, and head-to-head Texas Hold 'Em via the Zune's Wi-Fi transceiver.

But the most interesting part of the announcement was the advertising campaign. Not the advertisements themselves, although I'll be interested to see what the oddballs at Crispin Porter + Bogusky (who did the Gates-Seinfeld and "I'm a PC" ads) come up with. The fascinating part is that the … Read more

The great draw of portable MP3 players is quantity.

I remember when my wife and I took a six-month backpacking trip back in 1999. We never even considered bringing an MP3 player, which might have had a whopping 64MB of flash memory, enough for about a hour of audio compressed at 256kbps. Instead, we brought a Discman and about two dozen CDs in a soft case. We grew extremely bored with those CDs and ended up jettisoning or trading most of them.

Today, you'd laugh if somebody told you they were considering bringing CDs on a trip--why would you, … Read more

Update at 5:10 p.m. PDT: Changes were made based on a draft version of the Windows 7 Reviewers' Guide.

Microsoft took the wraps off the next version of Windows Tuesday at its Professional Developers Conference, and the Web's abuzz with first impressions and previews--most of which are positive.

It looks like Microsoft is making the right moves to counter some of the problems with Vista: application and hardware compatibility are top priorities, and most of the UI tweaks I've seen so far seem helpful rather than arbitrary, as many of the changes in Vista seemed … Read more

Last week some family members suffered a corrupted hard drive on their only PC. They had no backup. They're relatively light computer users--no online banking, no important business documents--but the lesson still hurts. Their e-mail contacts weren't too hard to recover--they simply called everybody they had regular e-mail contact with and told them to send an e-mail. Their digital photos are gone forever, unless emergency tech support courtesy of their son-in-law produces a miracle. And their music library?

That's one nice thing about having a large-capacity MP3 player: if you're lazy about backup, at least you … Read more

There has been much blogorrhea on Tuesday over Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's offhand comment to the Telegraph that the iPod would go the way of the transistor radio and the Sony Walkman, becoming a cheap and eventually boring commodity product.

News flash: it's already there. Sure, Apple will still sell millions of units every quarter, and it might even continue to grow unit sales and revenue for a while. But it's clear from Apple's most recent announcements that the company no longer views the iPod as its main vehicle for innovation--new (old) form factors, colors, and … Read more