Today the Zune sucks, tomorrow, who knows

For the few months leading up to Christmas I was excitedly telling my wife that I wanted a Zune. I had hear all the hype, all teh negative feedback, and felt like I should come to my own conclusion instead. But in the end, I got a 30GB Apple Video iPod. And boy am I glad I did. Here's why.

I had a neighbor friend get a Zune for Christmas, but he didn't realize that it required Windows XP (not his fault, consumers don't really look for those types of things, they just want one.) He doesn't have Windows XP, which I chastised him for; but again, not his fault. So, I told him sure, bring everything over and I'll help you get some "stuff" on your Zune.

First off, it doesn't sync with Windows Media Player. Want to know why Apple has such a huge market share? Because it integrates with iTunes, it's default media player. And if you're a PC person iTunes is easy enough to install and begin syncing. There are even plugins you can buy to hack Windows Media Player to sync your iPod. Ok, so on to the nightmare.

The kid hands me a CD, after telling me that I can't use WMP, so I through it into my laptop and start installing. Now, mind you I have a Pentium 4 CPU with a ton of RAM and hard drive space, and while I was installing this, I had nothing else running. The install took almost an hour. I'm not exaggerating. It took that long.

Next, I had a ripped CD which was in mpeg format, and I thought, wow, this should just drop right into the sync program and right onto the Zune. NOT. It started some conversion process that took another hour. No kidding. It was the oddest thing.

So, I tried some music, and again, some kind of conversion process. It reminded me of Active Sync, needing to convert every file that it shuttled across to my PDA. It was slow. And painful.

Now, I haven't done a lot of research, in fact none, as to why this would be such a ridiculous process, but if I can't just take shit out of the box, plug it in and start dropping files onto it, the point was missed for consumers. My iPod is so easy, I just drag and drop, no fuss, no mess.

Microsoft and Zune at some point may figure this out, but I can't believe the short sightedness of this product. I'm glad I didn't get one, for now anyway.

[Update: Oh my, what a bunch of misspellings. I updated the text to have correct spelling. Duh.]