It has always been easy to beat up on Microsoft’s Zune, but when the company announced last week that sales of the media player plummeted 54 percent year-over-year during the holiday shopping season, the entire internet piled on. The Zune-bashing reached epic proportions, as pundit after pundit called for Microsoft to axe the entire Zune division.
Given its poor sales numbers, we can safely say that most of Zune’s critics have never used the device, and even fewer of them have really spent any serious time with Zune’s online music store. But we have used it, and, what’s more, we like it. iTunes Music Store could learn a thing or two from Zune Marketplace, and if Microsoft does end up dropping Zune then the digital music ecosystem will be worse off for it.
We reviewed the original Zune in 2006, the Zune Flash in 2007, and the 3G Zune released last September, and in this review, we’ll take a look at the software side of the Zune experience. By the end of the review, we hope you’ll agree that there’s more at stake in the survival of Zune than just another Microsoft vs. Apple platform war.
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