iPod became a "hand-me-down" after Zune

First off, I have an X-Box 360. My Zune connects to it and allows me to play music off my Zune on my 360 which is connected to my surround sound system. It sounds beautiful. When I plug in the Zune via USB 2.0 to the 360, the system loads it within seconds. Browsing through the Zune library takes seconds, unlike when I connect my iPod on there, which takes a minute just to load the initial artists list, then half a minute to load in sub-categories. This boasts the faster processor inside the Zune. Another example of Zune's processor is the very minor and quick loading pause when playing long videos. I have a couple of videos on there that are about an hour long, and it loaded faster on my Zune then it did on my PC! The video was also extremely clear and the sound through my headphones was great. Playing videos through my 360 wasn't so great, it was extremely pixelated, but since I'll be rarely using that feature, that doesn't bother me much. The menus on the Zune is actually better then expected. I was expecting Microsoft to Windowize it with icons and embed the face of Windows Media Player everywhere. However the menu is straight to the point, you got your music, pictures, video, radio, community (for the wi-fi access) and settings. If you geek out and let the Zune software download album art and such, it makes it look extremely nice when browsing the Album section under Artists, as each band will have a thumbnails of some album art near each album, it makes it quite pretty. I can do without the gigantic letter that periodically appears to the right of the list when browsing through the Artists list, if anything it's more of a distraction, maybe in time they will get rid of that or have a setting for it, who knows. Pictures has the standard set up, where you browse through thumbnails and select what you want to full screen. You can even set a picture to be your background, similar to an actual PC. My wife was happy when I used our wedding picture as my background. Videos have a similar listing, with a thumbnail, name and basic info for each video you have on there. Videos actually look great for the size of the screen, making it great for travel use. I watched a couple episodes of Robot Chicken on the train and it was just as great of an experience as watching it at home, just got a few crazy looks from people after laughing. The sound is great, you can actually hear the differences between the equalization settings. I was a bit disappointed though that you can customize the equalizer, but maybe that will be in a later update. Battery life is quite nice too, I was using a Zune, showing it off to friends and family for almost 12 hours straight with no breaks and it went down to about half. For something that loads videos, music and connects to wi-fi? That's not bad at all. Now for the main reason why I gave this a 4 star rating instead of a 5, the software. I've never been so aggravated in my life. First off, it read a lot of my MOV files as music, not Movies. MOV is a Quicktime video format. I don't understand how one file works in Media Player well, but not in Zune, which is basically the same program just made into an iTunes variant. There was a couple of miscalculation errors when syncing, syncing itself can be difficult at times and the program itself takes forever to load! I hope they change it soon or some third-party support comes out soon. I do love my Zune though, just not the software. - Scott BRead full review