iPod vs. Zune: January 2008 High End MP3 Player Roundup
by Ryan Smith on January 21, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Zune 80
Last but certainly not least we have Microsoft's second-generation Zune, the Zune 80. If the iPod Classic is the old guard and the iPod Touch the new guard, then the Zune is the missing link, as its feature set includes items from both generations of products, with interesting results.
As the successor to the original Zune (30) which was developed prior to the Touch, the Zune 80 is best described as an attempt to build a bigger, better iPod Classic; AKA the proverbial iPod killer. The original Zune launched with fairly tepid reviews thanks to a combination of poor design choices with both the hardware and the software. Since then Microsoft has gone back to the drawing board and heavily revised the Zune's hardware for the Zune 80, and taken out many of the kinks in the Zune software, which has also been pushed out to the original Zune as an update. The result is that their second generation Zune is immediately a much stronger contender than the original Zune was.
At $249 for the Zune 80, the Zune 80 is clearly targeted against the 80GB iPod Classic which retails at the same price and features the same 80GB 1.8" hard drive. Microsoft seems content to leave Apple alone at the $349 price point for the 160GB iPod Classic.
One of the biggest complaints with the original Zune was the controls, and that's where we'll start. The original Zune used a d-pad in the shape of a circle along with buttons on the left and right sides, something that would seem to be more at home on a Windows Mobile PDA than a MP3 player. The d-pad's successor in the Zune 80 is a touch-sensitive pad (the Zune Pad) in the shape of a squircle. Notably, the Zune Pad is only a single button, emulating the previous Zune's d-pad by reading the location of the thumb when the Zune Pad is pressed.
On the whole the Zune Pad is a mixed bag. The lack of touch controls on the original Zune were a massive mistake and this makes up for it greatly, as it's now far easier to quickly navigate through lists thanks to the ability to flick your finger along the Zune Pad to launch the list up or down. The biggest shortcoming in its design however is the Zune Pad just isn't very accurate. Because the Zune Pad uses touch loaction to figure out what d-pad action it should be emulating (or if it should be emulating a centered button press), we continue to have periodic issues accidentally scrolling up/down as we press the button because the Zune Pad reads our thumb actions as a flick while we're pressing the button. Through a month's practice we've learned how to better work with the Zune Pad to try to avoid such accidents, but we haven't been able to stop them completely. This particularly manifests itself during blind navigation, making that task harder than it should be.
Less significant is the fact that Zune Pad is hard to get a read on in terms of sensitivity; every now and then the Zune Pad is reading small motions as bigger than they are meant to be. Much of this has to do with the fact that the Zune Pad is fairly small (1" diameter) and requires repeated motions to use, so the device has brief 1" motions to decide what's going on. In all fairness to Microsoft, this is a case where they're between a rock and a hard place with what Apple has done. The iPod scroll wheel is simply a fantastic design, it's very comfortable and easy to use, with no significant problems in our opinion and none of the issues we've had with the Zune Pad. But we believe Microsoft can't outright copy the scroll wheel both because Apple's legal team probably won't let the idea go without a fight and because there's a certain level of harm that would come to Microsoft's reputation if it was such an obvious copy.
So what we get is the Zune Pad, to the detriment of the Zune 80. Don't get us wrong, it's not terrible (if you want terrible ask us about a Rio, any of them), it's just not great either; it's better than the first Zune and still not as good as the competition. Ultimately it's not possible to avoid fighting with the Zune Pad at least once, which is a tough sell in the iPod age. We should note that you can turn the touch-sensitive features of the Zune Pad off, which would solve some of our problems, but then we'd just be back to a d-pad.
Moving on, we come to the UI of the Zune. In all honesty we don't have much to say about the UI because we're largely content with it. Its anti-iPod design is rather obvious at times, starting with the white-on-black design compared to the iPod's black-on-white design, but at the end of the day it accomplishes the same things and works out rather well. Hierarchies are very solid designs for a MP3 player interface, and this is what Microsoft sticks to. If you've used any other MP3 player then you're not going to immediately know where everything is, but once you've used one hierarchical design you've basically used them all and will quickly adapt to the Zune.
The only thing keeping us from calling the Zune UI a draw with the iPod Classic's (it's basically incomparable to the Touch) are two nagging issues with it that we're having. First is a matter of design, Microsoft decided to shorten the hierarchy some by making song groupings a horizontal list across the top with the elements appearing below, skipping the need to actually traverse deeper. In practice this saves a short amount of time traversing the UI, but it also has the side effect of not making all of the groupings visible at once. What are the grouping methods and how many clicks/flicks do we need to make to get to the one we want? Because they're not all on the screen at once, you can't tell without going through them all. It's only a problem for new users, but it's a problem none the less.
The other issue we have is with the responsiveness of the UI. Most of the time it's fast, but not always; certain actions such as traversing through the song grouping methods too quickly will result in a UI that feels sluggish - never slow but sluggish. It's not enough to significantly impact the usability of the Zune, but it is enough to be annoying. Who ever heard of a MP3 player being sluggish? It just shouldn't be happening.
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Drazic - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
I have my Zune 80GB for 3 years now. It has never been broken and the screen is still in good shape! The Zune is very easy to use, has wonderful music and the quality is very good. Of Course there are not a lot of European people who have the Zune, lucky me:)So they can't compare at all. Even though the people are saying that more of the population in the VS has the Mac Note Book I most say that all the people that I know, friends, college's,either way don't even want the Mac Note Book. They rather choose for an HP or a Toshiba!:) Simple because you don't have to buy of put pro gramme's on the computer that's only from Mac. Honestly!? The Toshiba & HP's are more beautiful. What's in a name!? (careless, it's only the brand)charlie brown - Wednesday, April 2, 2008 - link
If anandtech are going to use an audio analyser, shouldn't they understand the values and equipment they are measuring? As a professional audio engineer I find their conclusions disturbing...Why haven't you published numbers for THD +noise etc - you just draw your own conclusions from some 0.0... percentage?
All players frequency response is +/-dB from 0-20kHz. These are all excellent when you understand the freq response of a headphone - even top of the range sennheisers. How can you possibly describe one player response as very good/excellent etc?! You would NOT hear the difference whatsoever.
What possible difference does -100/-110/-120 signal to noise ratio really make for an mp3 player?? (audibly - absolutely none) these are all excellent.
"Earbuds generally lack bass due to their size"
This is only half the story, they perform better with good coupling to the ear (im sure youve pushed some phones into your ear and heared the bass improve?).
Have you guys ever stopped to think that you are reviewing an MP3 player? The nature of MP3 (being an audio compression developed from the 1980's) is that it is a LOSSY compression. THE ENCODING WILL DEGRADE THE SOUND QUALITY MORE THAN THE PLAYER EVER WILL, EVEN AT HIGH BITRATES.
Why doesn't anandtech throw them on the ground and record which one breaks the easiest - i mean this is more useful than the conclusions taken in your audio test.
abpages - Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - link
Feature wise the Zune 80 kills the Ipod.Also, the ipod has video out, but can't outpid it's interface.
The Zune can. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you ever want to hook this up to a tv or in my case a LCD in my Car it is fantastic. No looking down at the device to choose song (and possible crashing j/k), everything is on the screen all the menus.
I own both and the new Zune has it this time.
Ron Stark
http://www.WebSiteDesigners.net.au">http://www.WebSiteDesigners.net.au
Heatlesssun - Sunday, January 27, 2008 - link
I bought two Zune 80’s at Christmas, one for the wife and one for me, and they are great devices. I want to address two criticisms in this review. One, the Zune Pass is very cool. At $15 a month one can get one album versus thousands. If you know what you’re doing, subscriptions models like Zune Pass offer better value.Secondly, I think this review makes too much out of the lack of TV and movies on Zune Market place. There are so many ways to get content these days that it’s funny. Heck, if you’ve cable TV, there’s a source right there, and you’re not paying for the content again, which is cool.
Really, a person just needs a good set of transcoding software, that frees a person from being tied to any one content source.
9nails - Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - link
Want an external speaker? Perhaps you need an additional USB cradle? Do you need a carry case? Or maybe you would like a car adapter kit? How about a screen protector to save that investment?All of these things are easier to find on an iPod Accessory shelf. But the Zune shelf is shockingly bare. Perhaps the case or a new set of (universal) headphones is all that you can find for the Zune. For me, more than anything, the availability of accessories was a major decision maker in the search for an MP3 player. My second major factor was cost. Third was storage capacity. And least significant was battery life.
NewBozo - Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - link
Be sure to get an Archos 605 Wi-Fi for future media player reviews. It is much less expensive than anything you reviewed here, has drag and drop capabilities and can surf the web and stream video over the built in wi-fi. It is amazing!...newbozo
rcbm1970 - Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - link
"Did you know that 60 per cent of Americans received gift vouchers for Christmas? We didn’t either, but that’s just fuel for Anand Techie’s latest Ipod vs. Zune dissertation (squeezed into 10 pages). It’s a bit of a one-sided argument with iIpod coming out smelling like roses and Zune always the close-secnd-but-never-first. Get your Apple-certified endorsement here."Nitram49 - Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - link
Dude! I own a Iaudio X5, Ipod Shuffle(Garbage) and an Ipod Nano. Every chance I get I use the X5 because there is no comparison in sound to the Ipod's. With the ability to tweak the sound and produce some serious bass it can't be beat. I mean with my JBL reference 220 or AKG k-81 DJ I can walk around with so much bass that it is impressive, and then if needed flatten it right out with a plethora of controls(EQ,BBE,...,). Nothing beats the HDD capabilities of an X5. I heard the D2 and I can't imagine how you let a chance to review that slip through your hands in a comparison. Also my friend just got an Iaudio 7. wow. Give those dudes at Cowon a listen and you tell me if I'm wrong.TedKord - Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - link
IMO, if you're looking for an MP3/video portable player, you shouldn't be looking at either MS or Apple. I had a Cowon A2 which blew my friend's Ipod classic away in every respect (video/sound quality, format compatibility, features) except HD size. It was also better than the Zunes I've tried, though I've not tried the newer generation extensively. Another thing that should be mentioned with the Ipod is iTunes. I hate that program, it made me load QT, and everytime I disable the autoload for QT, it reenables when my daughter uses iTunes for her Nano 3G. Plus, they made me sign up with a crdit card to enable album art. With the A2, I just dragged and dropped my existing mp3, flac and ogg music right to it - no reencode or anything. Same with the divx/xvid movies I already had - drag, drop, watch.The iPod Touch is a cool device, but more for it's interface than it's video/audio quality.
michael2k - Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - link
Why do you hate your daughter? It sounds like you need to get her a computer of her own if you don't want her to synch her Nano (and thus re-enabling QuickTime, which is used for AAC encoding for iTunes if she's ripping music) to your PC.Besides which, why do you want to manually load and unload your MP3 player? The whole point of computers is to do the tedious things for us (such as ripping, tagging, organizing, and synching). Your daughter, with iTunes, only has to plug and go. If she has more music than the Nano can fit, it will auto-select her favorite music, or she can select (checkbox style) her favorite playlists, or manually (if she wishes to be like dad) to drag and drop songs and playlists to her Nano.