Tag: ZUNE

Whoaaa, a new graphic novel from Zune Arts. Microsoft's digital entertainment brand (it's not just a portable media player, ya know) just came out with 'The Lost Ones,' a collaboration between '30 Days of Night' author Steve Niles and a bunch of artists. Our favorite of the gang is painter Kime Buzzelli, whose awesome watercolors adorn a chapter involving aliens and caves and an ...

The latest edu-gimmick to hit small-town America: 100-plus media players -- Zunes, to be specific -- are being handed out to local high school and middle school students in Liberty, Missouri and Fort Sumner, New Mexico for listening to lesson-supporting podcasts in the hopes of saving them "lost class time." Surely this will raise test scores, right? Or at least improve the Zune's cachet? Who ...

Microsoft has quite a bit in store for the Zune faithful with its new Zune version 2.5 software update. The high points are the new Zune Card integration and the addition of TV show downloads on Zune Marketplace, but much-requested features like gapless playback, improved syncing controls, meta data editing, auto playlists and other tweaks have also been included. On the marketing front, ...

Listen to the silence, let it ring on. Microsoft is said to be releasing a limited edition, Joy Division Zune featuring an adaptation of Peter Saville's pulsating cover art from the band's 'Unknown Pleasures' debut. The launch is meant to parallel the June 10th release of the Joy Division DVD and could, in one fell swoop, lift the Zune above its L-7 image. Then we could go on as though nothing ...

We can't say we'd follow in this guy's footsteps for any amount of money, but boy, does it make for fantastic drama. Shortly after the famed Zune Guy (you know, that cat with a trio of Zune-inspired tattoos?) decided to legally change his name to "Microsoft Zune," the plan was put on hiatus after hearing that it cost a whopping $500 to get a name swap. It turns out that the fellow will only ...

It's amazing how quickly pieces of technology can become not only an accepted, but also indispensable parts of everyday life. It's hard to believe, but the MP3 player, now more accurately called the Digital Audio Player (DAP) or Personal Media Player (PMP), is 10 years old. Of course, most people just call it the iPod, but that's a whole other story. It was back in March of 1998 that the world ...

Microsoft's Zune just can't get any respect. With the recent launch of the new models, the players finally took shapes and sizes (and colors) that people liked. It certainly has the iPod beat in terms of functionality, with its song-sharing capabilities and compatibility with music stored in a number of file formats, but still nobody seems to care. Gamers might just start to take notice, ...

There is one sure fire way to make the normally quiet and geeky Bill Gates a little peeved -- question his company's record of "capitalizing on the innovation of others." According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop, that's exactly what a blogger, Jonathan Snook, did at a small meeting between the online-citizen journalists of the tech world and the founder/honcho of Microsoft at ...

Attempting to differentiate your portable music player from the iPod isn't easy; so Microsoft has taken quite a literal approach, by letting users...well, differentiate their Zunes. Zune Originals are built for those who love to customize: Head to the website and choose your color, text and/or art inscription (there's both an artist series and a tattoo series, with plenty of options for each). ...

The Zune 2.0 update is officially upon us. And not just in the form of new players, but in software updates for old Zunes as well. The new Zune 2.0 hardware will be on store shelves tomorrow, but those of you with Zune 1.0's can get a peak at the updates to the software now, by heading to Zune.net and downloading the firmware update. The update will update your old 30-gigabyte Zune player ...

Details are scant, but Gizmodo is speculating that October 16th will see the launch of Microsoft's Zune 2 media player, which is believed to be pictured above. Gizmodo claims to have obtained this image and information from a source who acquired it from Microsoft marketing materials. Here's what's being predicted: There will be a hard-drive based Zune, just like the original, except in an ...

In attempt to spur sales, Microsoft has just dropped the price of its 30 gigabyte Zune portable media player to $199. That keeps the player priced $50 lower than Apple's cheapest hard drive-based player -- the newly launched $249 80 gigabyte iPod Classic -- but still only offers less than half the storage. While announcing the price drop, Microsoft took the opportunity to also tout the Zune's high ...

If ever there was a sign of the iPod's ubiquity it's this: Amazon has separated out the iPod from the rest of the media player pack and created its own 'non-iPod' category to house the rest. Zunes, Creative Visions and all of the rest of them have been relegated to this generic category. Really, this is just confirmation of what we already knew: that the iPod has won. The iPod has become the ...

Reports are emerging this morning that MTV is on the brink of abandoning URGE, the company's iTunes-challenging service that was launched in partnership with Microsoft just over a year ago. Turns out Microsoft betrayed that partnership a few months later with the release of the Zune Marketplace, an online store optimized to work with Microsoft's iPod-wannabe, the Zune. MTV, playing the part of ...

Microsoft's Zune may not have received quite the same warm and loving reaction that Apple's iPod did, but if you ask Microsoft it's doing quite well on its own accord, thank you very much. The company has announced they not only met their goal of selling 1 million Zunes by the end of June, they actually exceeded it by 200,000. The Zune has captured an impressive 11% of the larger capacity hard ...