Having sold my old car to a dealership and traded off with my mother’s Toyota Camry (nice V6 btw), I also lost an essential part of me…or sort of me. In any case, my new car lacked an MP3 player of any sort and could only play conventional CD’s which are a pain in the butt to burn over and over again in comparison to just burning a CD filled with MP3′s. So of course, one needs to remedy the situation, and as such, I decided to go out and get some other kind of MP3 player that you could actually carry around with you and listen to once you left the car. Add to that the ability to carry all of your music on something, not just one MP3 CD at a time, and not have to switch CD’s while your out in traffic trying to look at the snowy Spokane road. I don’t know which is worse, the snowy or the Spokane part of that. Both combined just makes it disgusting. Anyways, I took one good look at the iPod and basically crumbled in disgust. It required iTunes (which I’ve had very bad experiences with), couldn’t play my WMA files, and converted all of your music from your computer to a jumbled up disorganized version onto your iPod (don’t believe me? If you have an iPod, go take a look at the files yourself and see that all of them have been put into 2 letter folders at random with some random name for each file in those folders. Luckily the ID3 tags are all still there, but I’d rather not deal with that mess). So were there any alternatives? Of course! Microsoft released their first generation model of the Zune, which could take my WMA files along with the AAC’s that the iTunes loved. Add to that the fact that had a bigger screen (same resolution as the iPod for video viewing, though), no weird scroll wheel ordeal, and wi-fi capability. Yeah, they put in a wi-fi card to have Zunes connect to each other and share stuff. Currently, the sharing is limited by DRM, but if something like Linux ever gets put onto the Zune, the DRM thing won’t be a big problem because it won’t even exist. The possibilities with linux are certainly interesting but it would be kind of hard to use the wi-fi with anything apart from other Zunes
(connecting to something like a router and trying to use the internet with only 6 buttons would be kind of hard, unless there was like an “on screen” keyboard). The storage amount remains the same as a standard video iPod (30GB). And an interesting tidbit that also stunned me once I bought the Zune and was fooling around with it – while an iPod cannot play music and do other things while charging through a USB cord by means of a computer(from my experience), the Zune can. Its nice playing Oblivion and listening to my Zune at the same time without wasting any battery life (which is 14 hrs on it). But what about the part I really care about – the price? Well, eBay is a good friend of mine, and $200 dollars seemed to be quite a bargain. In stores, the Zune regularly costs $250. That’s all well and good, but I still also need someway to hook it up to my car, in which case I plan on getting an FM radio transmitter from one of the Zune car packs (since the CD player in my car doesn’t have any type of inputs other than a CD, and radio, of course).

So basically, Zune FTW. Better clarification – Zune without DRM (Dumb Retarded Monkey) FTW.