Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Simmer down folks — everything is going to be a-okay. Yes, ’tis true — Microsoft has indeed scheduled for Xbox Live service maintenance and Zune service tweakage to take place at the exact same time this coming Monday, but it’s probably not worth losing your mind over. In fact, Major Nelson goes out of his way to affirm that “when [Xbox Live] service returns, you will not have any new features and you will not have the new Xbox experience update.” Point being, your Zune Social, Zune.net forums, all of the Zune Marketplace and Xbox Live services will be offline for up to 24 hours (48 hours for the Zune suite) starting at 12:01 PST on September 29th, but don’t expect a Zunephone to pop out of your now-forgotten HD DVD add-on when things come back on. Or you can, but we’d be prepared for unprecedented disappointment.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Read - Xbox Live down time
Read - Zune services down time

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Portable Audio

After a couple misstarts, we’ve finally got Zune 3.0 running on our computer and that shiny new blue Zune 8 we nabbed yesterday. We had problems with the straight installer, but updating from within Zune 2.5 worked quite well, and after a restart we were able to perform the same feat on the player. The software choked up on the first sync, but we canceled out and it twasn’t a problem.

With 3.0 all ready to go, we wasted little time jumping onto Marketplace wirelessly, which felt especially delicious on a teensy little flash DAP. Naturally, we could’ve squandered all our Microsoft Points on song buys — which are quite easy to accomplish, with a cart-based purchasing system — but we’re all about subscription music, and Zune Pass speaks our language. The browsing, selecting and downloading processing couldn’t be much easier, and you can pick a song to play from right in the store while browsing other wares. There were a couple hiccups in playback when switching tasks, but they were always brief.

Continue reading Zune 3.0 hands-on

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Seeing how long it took the Zune to make it over the northern border and into Canada, it shouldn’t be any surprise that it’s going to take even longer to get to Europe — not until late next year, according to the director of Microsoft France. The wait should be worth it, though: that’s when the third generation of Zunes will be released, as well as a Europe-friendly version of the Zune Marketplace. There are also some sketchy rumors that Windows Mobile 7 devices will be able to take advantage of Zune content and services, but it doesn’t look like Microsoft has anything to say about that yet — but if that goes down you know a Zune phone is right around the corner.

[Via Anything But iPod]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Gaming, Portable Audio, Portable Video

We’re nearly nauseous from all the spinning on the Xbox Live carousel. One minute we’re in, the next we’re out. Now, Microsoft is confirming that the issues are back via Xbox.com, and as if that weren’t enough in and of itself, the outfit is also informing Zune owners that they “may experience intermittent issues logging onto Zune Marketplace.” From what we can tell, there’s no definitive ETA on a resolution that will actually stick for more than ten minutes, but if we were you, we’d lock down that Hotmail account, pronto.

[Thanks, Robert S. and everyone who sent this in]
Read - Xbox.com Support
Read - Zune.net Support

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

As we noted in our Zune launch post, with the new Zune announcements, Microsoft intends to do more than just launch hardware. The Zune crew has apparently done a complete overhaul of the Zune desktop software so it’s no longer just a weak rebadge of Windows Media Player 10 (praise the heavens), which Microsoft hopes will help the social to get more, um, social-er, with a number of things to attempting better engage music listeners and Zune customers:

• The Zune Marketplace is officially adding DRM-free music support, launching with over a million DRM-free MP3 tracks. As we mentioned earlier, other details (like which labels, whether there is a DRM-free upgrade path is for users who’ve bought music with DRM, price differences, etc.) are not yet known.
• Zune Marketplace is also getting podcasts and music videos. (Great, but where’s the real video content?)
• Microsoft is also launching Zune Social, a free online music community / social network (great, another social network!) which allows users to create…
• Zune Cards, which are web widgets not unlike Xbox’s Gamer Cards. Zune Cards let other users track your most played and recently played music (updated each time you sync back to your host machine). Users can also sample music directly from someone’s Zune Card.
• You can now share with others music that was shared with you.
• No, the Zune still doesn’t analyze the tracks it shares, so Zune Pass unlimited customers still can’t share music without DRM.
• But, at very least the Zune’s 3×3 DRM no longer has a time limit. Same three play restriction, but it no longer has to be within three days.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!