Zune 30 GB Review - Features
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Microsoft has made the user interface easy and stylish at the same time. As mentioned earlier in the review, the user navigates through the menu system via a wheel control. When navigating through the menus, the Zune's responsiveness is great. There are various cool effects and such when navigating through the menus, which give it a personal touch.
The large three inch screen is bright and colorful. The screen has a maximum resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, and is visible even in bright light. What is also nice about the screen is that the user may view their photos in portrait view, or they can the Zune sideways and view the image in landscape view.
One drawback of the Zune is the supported formats of audio and video. The Zune will only support WMA-DRM9.1, unprotected AAC, and MP3 formats for audio. This means that the only choice for subscription music services is ZunePass, which currently costs $14.95 per month. The video will not support DRM videos, DivX, or Xvid formats so the user would have to convert these files to a WMV format by using some sort of converting software.
Supposedly, in the future, Microsoft will offer a wider range of formats that are compatible in the Zune. For now though, users of the Zune are pretty limited. As with video and music files, photos are also limited in terms of compatibility. Currently, only JPEGs are compatible with the Zune.
Probably the coolest feature of the Zune is its WiFi capabilities. This feature is also a bit limited though. The WiFi can be used to transfer songs or photos to other Zune users. Microsoft has made this very easy to do, with a one button operation to send. The range of the WiFi is somewhere around 50 feet when out in the open, but indoors it may drop to 30 or 40 feet.
It would have been nice for Microsoft to use the WiFi capabilities to allow users to transfer files to and from the computer wirelessly, but that is not the case. The WiFi is only capable of transferring files from one Zune to another Zune. It's still a great feature nevertheless, and Microsoft will improve the WiFi capabilities of the Zune in the future, so it's something to look forward to.
The built-in FM radio is also a nice addition to the Zune. It features an autoscan mode which will find the clearest stations, and unlimited presets. It also features a built-in RDS which displays the station name, and sometimes the song, on the screen.
The 30 GB that the Zune offers is good to have. This allows the user to store about 7, 500 songs, or 25,000 pictures in the Zune itself. One drawback of the Zune is that it doesn't allow files, such as Word docs, to be stored on it and transferred to the computer, in the way that a flash drive operates. This will probably change in the future.
When purchasing the Zune 30 GB, you can expect to see the following in the box:
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