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Zune 3.0 Firmware Review
The Zune’s 2.5 firmware update left Zune in a very good position in the Media player market, though there were a few glaring issues left behind. For instance, why no audiobook support? Why no Wi-Fi store? And most importantly (if some people, like me, are to be believed) why no clock! Has Microsoft taken these issues to heart, and firmly established the Zune as a viable iPod alternative for the masses?
Lets take a look firstly at the main menu. Boot up your Zune for the first time after updating (a relatively short process in itself, taking less than a few minutes, with no need for human guidance), and you’ll notice one thing straight away: The menu font got smaller! It was one of the things that first stood out when you showed a Zune to someone: the nice, large menu font, which most people, including me, were quite fond of. Of course there is a reason for this downscaling, and that’s mainly the addition of the “marketplace” menu item below podcasts. Oh, and you’ll also notice below that the new “games” menu item, if you selected to install then during the firmware upgrade (assuming of course that you weren’t one the few people to use the XNA Game Studio back in the days of 2.5 for playing Zune games). Audiobooks will also appear on the menu when you’ve synced your first audiobook (more on this later) .
   
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Starting with the new, clicking Marketplace will bring you too the new Marketplace menu, and from here you can choose either “top songs”, “top albums”, “new releases”, “search” and “cart”.
Before even using any of these options though, you need to be connected to an active Wi-Fi network, and this has been made easier thanks to the runs ability to now actively scan for any available wireless networks (instead of having to set up a singular network from the Zune Desktop software). Choosing “networks” from the wireless option in the settings menu lists all available networks (though only those broadcasting their ssid’s unfortunately), and clicking on one connects you to that network. If your network has a password, the Zune will let you enter that password using its new text entry system (which I’ll look at a little later). This is a rather welcome, and certainly well needed addition to the Zune’s firmware.
After connecting to your network, you’re free to use the wireless marketplace. I’ll start by looking at “new releases”. Clicking on new releases will bring up the 30 latest new album releases in the marketplace, and display their album art in a grid style view on your screen, with nice sharp album art. Clicking on any album will then list all the album’s titles in the Zune’s familiar “twist” ui and giving you the option to play the songs or add to cart.
 
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It’s here that the Zune Pass* really does come into its own, and reinforces just how much of a brilliant idea it is. Get this: Anyone with a Zune Pass can access nearly the entire Zune Marketplace, to play any of the music, any time, without the need to download (by streaming), as long as they’re in a Wi-Fi network. Yep, that’s right, if you have a Zune pass, you can select any song or album, press “play”, and the entire song will start playing, just like that. No long downloads, no wasted HDD space. It just plays (Though there is about a 2 second buffering time, for the song to initially load, but after that is just plays smoothly throughout). This is, unquestionably, an utterly brilliant decision on Microsoft’s side, and fantastic value for Zune pass owners. Its also worth nothing that Apple and other PMP makers can’t replicate this yet, as they have no subscription service!
Of course, for those of us who don’t own a Zune pass, you can still listen to the normal 30 second preview clips off every single song, which is nice for finding new music. Hear a song you like? Just click “add to cart. If you have a Zune pass, going to your cart will let you permanently download the album/song for free, otherwise, you’ll have to make sure you’ve topped up your Zune points. Don’t fret though, even if you haven’t, the songs in your cart will sync to your PC’s cart the next time you sync the devices’, and wait there patiently until you purchase them, which is an extremely handy and well implemented feature
Choosing either “top albums” or “top songs” from the marketplace brings up, the selection in a view very reminiscent of the devices music menu’s artist menu, with genres selectable across the top, though the choice of genres seems to be a bit questionable
Choosing “search” from the menu allows you to quite simply search for your chosen song, album or artist. Text entry is done through a new interface, which allows you to scroll up and down to select a letter, which is very efficient as it uses the Zune’s momentum based scrolling feature, and moving left and right allows you to choose the next letter. Its a very admirable text entry system for the device, and it does work quite well.
Searching brings up the results reasonably fast, and allows you to view all the data you need, though again, as per the desktop software there is no spelling correction, though this is easier to accept on the device.
 
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Undoubtedly the wireless Marketplace is a fantastic addition to the Zune software, though there are some quibbles I have. At the moment, the Marketplace only consist of music, with no Videos. It would be nice to have access to the video store in the future, though again this would be far more reasonable if they could speed up the download speeds, which are around just over a minute for a 6MB MP3 file, painfully slow speeds. It would also be nice to have a podcast section in the marketplace, downloading singular podcasts would be quite nice!
Games are another new addition (fully) to the firmware. Clicking on the games option gives you access to the Zune’s games list, which upon installing the firmware includes too Microsoft games, the highly addictive puzzle game HEXIC, and the poker game TEXAS HOLD EM’ (which is unfortunately the worst video game version I’ve played yet). The Zune’s games are built using Microsoft’s free tool XNA Game Studio, which allows anyone with the right know how to create games for Zune, for free! XNA itself allows developers to create full 2D games (the Zune doesn’t support proper 3D), and take advantage of Zune’s built in Wi-Fi for wireless multilayer for up to 8 players, and access the users pictures and non-DRM music for use in games. One of the cooler features of t games though is that say if you’re playing music or even listening to the radio, that will continue playing even when you start playing the game, so you can listen and play at the same time! (If the game allows it you can also change song in the game, but currently no radio tuning support is available)
So far the games are promising, but nothing more than idle time wasters, and the communities homemade games are by a large no match for Microsoft’s own Hexic, though Zune Solitaire, Sir Tet, and the upcoming Valguard’s Fate are all worth a look at. In the near future however, I expect this greatly to change, as more skilled developers start picking up the tools and making games.
At the moment installing the games on to the device is a rather twisted process, and there is no official games depot for developers to post their games on the Zune marketplace, which is a rather large downside, but I fully expect that within the year Microsoft will sort this out.
 
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The final main menu addition is that of Audiobooks. Microsoft has finally allowed us to sync and play the popular audiobook file format on our Zune players. Support is pretty basic at best, but it’s definitely functional. There’s no manual bookmarking support, though the Zune will save your current position in the book when you stop listening. Books with multiple parts are all stored under the same header, and the book Title is darkened out when you finish listening to the book. Honestly, there’s not much more to say about Audiobooks here, they just work, and its about time they made it to Zune.
The music playing features of Zune haven’t seen much work done to them, and to be frank they don’t really need too much work done to them. The most notable change however is the replacement of the quicklist with a new “now playing” playlist. The now playing feature is both a blessing and a curse, it adds the much needed functionality to remove individual songs from the playlist, which was the quicklist’s main problem, but unlike the quicklist, it no longer saves your playlist between power offs. So basically one step forward, one step backward, great! Obviously, the ideal solution would be to have one playlist that does both, and to be honest it’s puzzling as to why the Zune team didn’t do this in the first place. They’ve also added support for viewing and playing your channels (read the Software review for more info on channels).
Unfortunately, music fares much worse off still in the new firmware, which has brought with it a number of annoying new bugs. These range form minor annoyances such as 4 second waits between some songs, songs being cut off and switched before the end, and wildly increased slowdown and pauses whilst selecting new songs. You’ll also get the device actually freezing then restarting itself sometimes when you choose a song. Note that although this isn’t constant, it happens very regularly, which is unacceptable, and smells of a rushed development or poor testing, which is odd in itself as there seem to be no changes to the music playing functionality, so how did they manage to mess it up? So, seems the firmware has managed to make Music playing worse (though not by much).
 
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There are still a couple of other minor bones I have to pick with the music section. One, the shuffle feature is not actually random. It repeats the same few songs time and time again, and seems to totally ignore some of the other songs in your playlist. A FAR more random mode would be greatly appreciated. This isn’t helped by the fact that if you’ve got repeat on, shuffle won’t even bother playing the whole playlist before repeating songs, so you’ll end up not hearing songs entirely! Secondly is the continued exclusion of the sound EQ on the second generation Zune devices. The Zune team blame this on a lack of hardware in the newer devices, but is any audiophile will know, most eq’s are actually software based. Ok, it may drain the battery somewhat more, but hey, why not just give us the feature and warn us about it, instead of excluding it entirely? It seems somewhat ludicrous to me, and I do hope the Zune team do see sense some time soon.
Picture viewing has disappointingly received no new features this time, leaving me with the same sense of discontent, as well as also introducing a highly annoying new bug. Now, when zooming into a photo, and attempting to pan around, you get an absurd delay between your input and the actual view moving, which is extremely annoying and feels highly unpolished, and there’s really no excuse for this bug in here. In a nutshell, this firmware has made Pictures an overall worse of experience too.
What I’d like to see, after that bug fix, is the obvious ability to rotate the photo’s on the screen, (the Zune firmware currently rotates the image 270 degrees), to view them normally or rotated. A few more slideshow transitions wouldn’t go amiss either, as slideshows is a pretty basic functionality at the moment (though admittedly the same can be said for all PMP’s).
Video’s has had nothing done to it, at all. Still the same decent navigation system then. Of course, there’s still the outstanding issue of some 640x480 encoded videos which randomly cause the device to turn off and restart, which still hasn’t been addressed. No genre view, and no options to automatically remove black borders from videos, which is something the Zune team should be doing, not resting on their laurels here; not until it’s perfect.
Podcasts, meanwhile, has received an extra little feature, which is that you can now set a podcasts status to “unplayed” if you ever feel the need too. Not particularly the most amazing feature ever, and rather oddly you can’t do the same to audiobooks, and I really think this is something the Zune team should implement next time round. Although, it’s also lost its ability to continuously play through a particular subscription, i.e. instead of automatically moving onto the next item in the podcast and playing it after the previous one finishing, it just returns to the podcast menu. Not a big loss in my opinion, though still a settings option to return it would be nice for those few who preferred it.
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Radio has received one of the more hyped updates in the firmware, with its new “Buy from FM” feature, which theoretically allows you to tag and buy any song you’re listening too on the radio, as long as the station is broadcasting the correct RDS data.
And it’s that last point which is what it all hinges on, and it’s that that’s the problem. Me living in the UK, we have plenty of good FM radio stations, nearly all broadcasting RDS data. And unfortunately, the vast majority of them don’t broadcast song information in the RDS data, and those that do, do it in a way which is incompatible with the Zune’s buy from FM feature (I.E., the Zune does not recognise the song). So practically, this new feature is more or less useless for us international users. In the U.S of A, its a slightly more positive story. There are a number of stations that transmit the correct RDS data, though these tend to be in bigger cities.
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Of course, this addition unfortunately spells the death of any hope that the Zune team may one day introduce a “Record from FM” feature, which is quite a downer, as a number of players on the market currently include this feature, which a number of people, myself included, find quite useful.
There is one last MAJOR addition though, and it’s one that’s been a long time coming. Finally, the Zune has a viewable clock!! Although initially hidden after the update, going into settings you can now find an option to turn on the clock, which appears in the top right corner of the home screen. You wouldn’t believe how much of a welcome addition this is, it’s practically excuse enough to upgrade to the 3.0 firmware! Unfortunately the Zune team haven’t taken the opportunity to elaborate on this feature, so still no sleep timer or alarm clock. Still, babies steps, right guys?
Now for some general moaning! For starters, the default device background has been changed from the Zune pattern, to a rather ugly plain black colour, which is, in every opinion, a stupid decision to make, and just looks plain ugly. Secondly, the user chosen backgrounds still come out looking like crap sometimes, with really ugly JPEG compression applied to them, which in conjunction with the Zune’s frankly poor screen (which can only display 65k colours), can really make some backgrounds look really poor. Higher quality would be much desired. Thirdly, the Zune’s hard drive is still locked, and can’t be used as a USB hard drive, which I would really like (though this would cause issues with Smart Sync, the option to turn off Smart Sync altogether and unlock the hard-drive would be pleasant).
TV-Out still looks sub-par over composite (I don’t have the component equipment, nor have I ever seen photos of the picture quality to comment), and is extremely choppy. A lot of optimization and graphical improvements needs to be done in this area. Its worth noting that while integration with the 360 is extremely basic (360 is the only non-PC device that can read files on the Zune as of writing), this is more of an issue with the 360’s firmware, and not the Zune’s.
I’d also like the option to hide menu items like “social”, “podcasts” and “marketplace” for those of use that don’t use them, to stop them sitting there and wasting space on our menus.
It’s hard to rate this new firmware. The Zune’s firmware had left it as a fantastically capable device, with little to no bugs or issues to speak off. Little has been done to upgrade the existing features, which while usable, have much room to be fleshed out. And while this new firmware does add some welcomed new features, like Marketplace and Audiobooks, it also brought with it a whole host of new, and impossible to ignore issues. And for those of us who won’t use any of the new additions for whatever reason, the firmware essentially warrants itself as a downgrade. Harsh, but unfortunately true. Its a nice start, but the Zune team have a lot of polishing work to do here it seems.
Final Rating:   
3.5 out of 5
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Posted on 25 Oct 2008 by Johnny Westlake
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