Zune – I’m Rooting For You

I must say that other than the desire to see some balance in the market for digital music, there really isn’t anything I read or saw yesterday that makes me want to run out and buy a Zune.

I’ll probably do it anyway because I care a lot about this stuff and want to get a sense of what this new device can do.

Wifi is great. That’s been available in Music Gremlin already. Will buying music over the air be the killer app? Listening to music over the air most certainly is.  The inclusion of an FM radio is acknowledgement of that fact. Too bad it isn’t an HD radio. I am sure it will be in a couple years when HD gets low power and lower price points.

The ability for anyone to send me a song over wifi to my device is pretty cool. That happens already computer to computer so it’s pretty clear that music sharing is a big part of the appeal of digital music.

The “three free listens limitation” is interesting. If I can simply click on a button and it unlocks the file over the air and charges my account $0.99, then that’s pretty nifty. But the problem is the file will surely be drm’d in Microsoft’s format and I won’t be able to play it on my iPod.

So in the end the best I can hope is Microsoft takes some share of the market and then the device interoperability becomes an even bigger issue, leading of course to a standard, which we all know is mp3.

So that’s why I am rooting for Zune.