The Buzz: Zune's Colors a Hot Topic
Microsoft's official unveiling of the Zune Thursday received mixed reviews from the tech faithful. While many seemed to generally give a positive nod to Zune's feature set, the Redmond company's odd choice of brown as a launch color seemed to grab the most attention -- and obviously the snarkiest comments.
While we've left those to be read in the story on Zune's launch, we have selected a handful of comments representing a variety of opinions on the new device. Later, we'll have more in-depth analysis of the product from several high-profile analysts who have studied Microsoft's entrant into the music player space.
"Music sharing is one of the differentiating features. I find the approach surprisingly consistent with some other stuff coming out of Microsoft ... Several people have asked me the same question this afternoon. So, I want to ask the question here to Microsoft. Brown?"
- Joe Wilcox, Microsoft Monitor
"I think if I were buying, I'd buy brown. I like brown ... I have a ton of brown clothes. I think the color is going to matter a lot less than if they had a lot of cool peripherals. What are the default headphones going to look like, for example? The iPod headphones are not good at all. The bigger screen is nice, too."
- Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft Watch
[Regarding Zune's sharing features] "I liked it better when I could dub a tape for a friend, or loan them the CD for a while. This is more like forced marketing, with advanced DRM. How long till spyware starts showing up in the code?"
- BetaNews Reader "The Man"
"Brown? Maybe one of the people making the colors decision was a fashion designer and were stuck on that "brown is the new black." I could see black, white and yellow...or red or neon green...or pink...anything other than brown really."
- BetaNews Reader "Austin814"
"Wow, I like it. I am surprised as I have bought 3 iPods and didn't think anything could compete. I like the FM Tuner, the Wi-Fi and the sharing ability MS has put into it. The screen can also be viewed in portrait or landscape."
- BetaNews Reader "mjtrike97"
"It's a sleek piece of craftsmanship that's simple and functional. It doesn't have the sexiness of the iPod, but it does have a graceful utilitarianism. The brown is an attractive, earthy shade and was my favorite of the three. (It looks much better in person that what is represented by the stock image)."
- Glenn Peoples, blogger who had an early preview of Zune
"I don't get it. Should I be using Napster, URGE, or Zune? Should I be using the Clix or the Zune? Should I be using Windows Media Player 11 or the Zune Marketplace software? There are too many choices, many of which are not interoperable, coming to me from the same company: Microsoft. Instead of simplifying the market, they've made it slightly more complicated with Zune (and likely pissed off countless partners in the process)."
- Technology pundit Chris Pirillo
"Clearly all the data isn't in yet, but this definitely pushes the MP3 player out of the pocket and into the realm of social networking. The question, obviously, is what is Apple going to do about this and, as a corollary, how low Apple and Creative shares are selling as we speak? Perhaps MS could create a "Zune Inside" logo for those guys? Or maybe fund a halfway house for underconnected MP3 players? "
- John Biggs, TechCrunch