Third time's the charm

It's taken three generations of Zunes to avoid the curse of the squi-. First-gen Zunes were all about the Social—and "squirting" your tunes to other Zunes. The term, widely mocked, gave way to the second-gen "squircle" controller, which sent shivers down the spines of Microsoft's PR team.

The third generation of Zunes leaked out of Redmond a bit earlier than planned, but everything is now official and on store shelves, the new firmware and client software is out, and there's a refreshing lack of new squi- about the whole experience. As the old saying goes, Microsoft does learn its lessons the third time around.

Microsoft now has a mature ecosystem (music store, video store, community features, hardware) built around some smooth-looking gadgets and a nice interface—there are even some games!—but as Steve Jobs reminded us during Apple's recent nano unveiling, Microsoft also has less than a 3 percent share of the media player market. Can features like FM radio tagging, wireless sync, wireless store browsing, free McDonald's WiFi access, WiFi streaming, some new colors, a clock (!), and larger capacities do much to change that?

Zune: So good, who needs changes?

The Zune has followed a different development path from the iPod. Microsoft, perhaps recognizing that it needed to do all it could to appeal to new customers, built a feature set into the first Zunes that has yet to be changed in any major way. All Zunes feature WiFi, FM radio, a click pad, the same data connector, and the same screen resolution (though the gen 2 Zunes did add touch sensitivity to their click pad).

With every new release, Microsoft has rolled out the same new firmware to every Zune model; even the new games will work on the original Zune 30. The idea, I've been told, was to build a hardware set of features that would stay constant over time but allow for creative innovation, and we can finally see the promise of the initial hardware specs being lived up to by the new firmware upgrade.



The complete Zune lineup

What's unusual about the gen 3 Zunes is the look of the devices: it's identical to the earlier models. There's a smaller, candybar-looking, flash-based player that comes in multiple colors, and a chunkier, hard-drive player that comes in black. The new hardware features upgraded capacity (16GB and 120GB, respectively) and a pair of new colors, but that's it—this is a software upgrade more than a true generational shift.

Radio tagging

One of Zune's most intriguing new features this time around is FM radio tagging. According to Microsoft's own research, most people discover music today through two sources: friends and the radio. (It also doesn't hurt that Apple won't include a radio, so everything done with this functionality creates a new talking point that the Zune has against the competition.)

Microsoft has gradually rolled out community discovery features, not to mention all that "squirting" from friends, but it has done little to make radio music discovery easier. This time around, the Zune can grab RDS metadata from radio and store it in list for later viewing or purchase of music. It's a slick feature—click the squircle once when listening to a radio station and "add song to cart" is selected. Click it again and the song goes into your queue. The list can be viewed on the Zune itself or on the desktop software after a sync.



A radio station

showing metadata

Unfortunately, there are problems—not so much with Microsoft as with the radio stations. As a test, I tried to add nine songs from several different stations to my cart. The system could only identify three of them.

Taking a closer look at the metadata, one can see why. Rather than transmitting the artist and track names separately (and leaving out all extraneous identifiers), many radio stations run them all together. For instance, Beck's song "Loser" was listed as "93XRT LOSER/BECK" in the metadata, while another station used "It's Trace Adkins with 'You're Gonna...'"

Fortunately, a classic rock station in town broadcast its data in Zune-friendly fashion, so I was able to have REO Speedwagon's "Ridin' the Storm Out" correctly identified.

Users with a subscription Zune Pass can then download and listen to the song right from the device or via the desktop client; those without can hear a 30-second sample or choose to buy the song using the (dreaded) Microsoft points system common to the Xbox 360 as well. It's all quite slick, so long as it works.