Last Summer I purchased my friend’s Creative Zen Vision M music player as he had chosen to get something much smaller and not as cumbersome as he felt this particular player was (it’s no worse than the size of the I-pod but he can be rather fussy at times). I think he went with a smaller Creative Labs device in the end and since I didn’t really have a player of my own yet I was totally interested in it. The size was 30GB and while smaller than the newest I-Pod I was one of those consumers who wanted to give the other guys a chance (plus he had not cleared off all of his music before giving it to me which was cool since he had a number of albums that I didn’t own on CD to upload myself). I was happily rolling along with said device and even did the proper tech guy stuff of updating its firmware and making sure everything it needed to be a cool addition to my arsenal was put into place. Better categories and stuff along those lines but after several months the device started to grow tired of me and chose to run off with the thief who rifled through my bag while covering an event. Believe it or not, this wasn’t even a Metal show, but something a little higher brow, and that’s where the friggin’ thing gets lifted from me. “Bah” is all that I have to say about that occurrence. Of course this began the craving for a new device because I was now officially addicted to having a music player on me so while I had debated upon an I-pod I found the price of the one I wanted to be too pricey. Creative Labs had a newer Vision M which was 60GB but it was around the same price as that I-Pod I just mentioned which was far bigger – alas what to do and what to choose was beginning to drive me crazy. Then it hit me – a few members of my PiercingLegions were using Microsoft Zune’s and while they were the initial run of the device, they had said that the really liked the difference and it also made them feel good since they were so anti I-pod. Don’t get me wrong, I am not anti I-Pod at all, and rather like the ones that my friends have but I tended to agree that perhaps I should continue the aspect of “giving the other guys a chance”. As luck would have it they now offered a device that was in my price range and also the newest model on the market. Having tried my friends 30 gigabyte Zune I was immediately impressed at how much lighter this 80 gigabyte one was and I immediately ordered myself one via Amazon.com – I’ve provided a link below for you to do the same should the rest of this musing about the item fall in line with your own thoughts. Keep reading to find out what I liked and didn’t like about it.
Continue reading Microsoft’s “Zune” Media Player Is “Zune-tastic”