Collecting Zune HD Impressions & the One Reason I Want to Buy One

Microsoft’s iPod touch competition, the Zune HD, was released yesterday (Sept. 15). Let me clarify two things before I continue with links and commentary.

1. I think that Microsoft missed a golden opportunity to deliver a knock out punch to the iPod touch. Imagine, for example, if it had included a camera of some kind (still or video) in the Zune HD while Apple delivered its 4th generation iPod touch without one just last week. Imagine if Microsoft had delivered the Zune HD with a full Internet Explorer 8 browser supporting both Adobe Flash and Microsoft’s own Silverlight. You can probably come up with a few of your own “imagine if” examples.
2. That said (#1 above), I may plunk my own hard earned cash down to buy a Zune HD for one reason and one reason alone: Project Gotham Racer. PGR and PGR II were my favorite games on the old first generation Xbox. If it is half as good on the Zune HD, the hardware purchase may be worthwhile.

So, let’s take a look at a couple of interesting articles that came out in the past 48 hours.

Geek.com’s Joel Evans had a hard time finding someone at his local Best Buy who even knew what a Zune HD was (on launch day) and then had problems finding one in the store to buy. He also seemed annoyed that the Zune HD didn’t have games installed out of the box. Joel had to sign-up for a Zune account before he was able to install the games (which can be downloaded without an account). And, all this has to be done over WiFi which means you have to configure the Zune HD for your WiFi network before doing anything. No plug and go.

Microsoft Zune HD: Purchase experience and first impressions

Wired.com’s Brian X. Chen opines that…

Microsoft Sets Up Zune HD for Failure – Again

His focus is purely on the Zune HD’s app story (or lack thereof so far).

AppleInsider’s Prince McLean writes what read to me like a very well-researched technical article in…

From OLED to Tegra: Five Myths of the Zune HD

Don’t let the blog’s name throw you off (AppleInsider). This is not a simple op-end hatchet piece. I feel like I learned a lot by reading what was written about the Zune HD’s…

1. OLED screen
2. NVIDIA Tegra processor

The other items in the article are more familiar to me but very useful reads if you are not familiar with the topics…

3. HD video
4. HD radio
5. Zune HD’s games

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