Zune 80

I recently purchased a Microsoft Zune 80, primarily for use on trips and such and with the idea of buying a speaker dock or plugging it into my stereo at home. Overall I’m very satisfied with it. It comes with ‘premium’ ear buds and a USB cable. Besides music, video, podcasts, and pictures, the Zune 80 has a RBDS-enabled FM radio and wireless-sync capability.

The music sounds good (AA3, wma, protected-wma, wma-lossless, mp3) and the video (wmv, mpeg-4, h.264) displays nicely for its size (320 x 240 resolution; 3.2 inch diagonal screen). It can only show pictures in jpeg. The software for syncing the Zune 80 to my PC installed quickly with no problems and so far has worked perfectly on Vista. Both the PC Zune software and Zune have a very easy-to-use and intuitive interface.

The PC Zune software, in addition to managing / syncing my music, videos, and pictures, looks like an alternative to Windows Media Player -- capable of ripping and burning CDs. One definite annoyance I've discovered is that if I delete any files from my "collection" in the PC software, then the next time I sync the same files will be deleted on my Zune. So far I haven't found a way - if there is one - to deactivate this stupid, inane function. If I want to remove files from my Zune I'd prefer to do it manually.

I have no immediate plans to sign up to Zune Marketplace but it's a similar concept to Apple's iTunes store. I haven't tried subscribing to any podcasts, but according to the Zune official site it's not necessary to get podcasts through the Marketplace.

I have my eye on several Zune 80 accessories but the selection is limited right now -- I'm going to wait a little bit before forking over even more money.