I have to be honest, this one sort of blows me away because I saw the headline and figured I could predict what the 5 reasons would be. As I wrote back in January in Can Microsoft Save the Zune?, there are plenty of serious issues facing Microsoft's would-be digital media platform and the company isn't exactly moving quickly to rectify any of them. But this one is kind of bizarre. Check out the five reasons:
5. The software and music categorization. It's also nowhere near as good at categorizing music as iTunes. In fact, when I imported my iTunes library into the Zune software, it couldn't figure out the difference between album and artist for most songs, so browsing the collection on the device is a total nightmare.
4. The headphones.
3. The player interface. There are just way too many clicks required to play a song, way too many to add a song to a playlist on the fly, and way too many menu items that aren't songs at the top of the Quick List playlist ... The Zune has a huge screen. In most cases, that's great. But does it really have to display the album art for what you're listening to at the full size of the display?
2. The wireless is worthless. All it can do is sync music wirelessly on my home network.
1. The erasing of my server-stored music. The software, in its auto-sync wisdom, removed every single song from the device that was not stored locally on the computer.
This list is pretty clueless. In fact, aside from number 2, which is only true if you ignore the home theater scenario I outline in my Zune 2 review, and number 1, which seems like a simple glitch and not an endemic problem, what we have here is ... no substantive complaint at all.
But the Zune does have some serious issues. It doesn't support smart playlists. The sync model is overly-simplistic. The online store has only a smattering of MP3 songs and they're impossible to find; plus where's the video content? And on and on and on. It's all detailed in that article I pointed to above. But this... this is just a rant about one person's experiences, not an overview of problems most Zune users will have.
You know. All 17 of them.
Which, frankly, is the biggest problem.
