I have a Zune 80… that just died. I cannot blame anyone but myself. It may be repairable, but I don’t know if that would be cost effective. I dropped it. That’s my fault. It seemed fine. I even took it on a trip to Dallas during the holidays to watch some X-Files episodes during down time.
While watching an episode the battery indicator suddenly said full. Oh great, I thought, now I will not be able to tell when it is out of juice. I finished watching that episode and plugged it into the charger.
When I got home and wanted to update the Zune it started just fine, but kept flashing the low battery warning. No problem, I never did get to finish charging it in Dallas and it has been sitting alone for a while. So I plug it in and left it to charge. A couple days later I was getting it ready for coming back to work and the battery is dead.
I believe it has lost the ability to charge the battery. This might be something as simple as a loose connection inside the device. I may try to open it, but I am not very good with small electronics. I am not hopeful that it will come back to life.
So… the big question is to I get a new Zune HD or something else… meaning an iPod. I like the Zune 80. I have about 34-35 GB of music and I was able to keep all of it on the Zune 80. The Zune HD tops out at 32 GB. This means I will have to pick and choose what music I put on it. And don’t forget I need to leave room on it for those X-Files episodes (and Battlestar Galactica is after X-Files).
My two sons each have an iPod Touch. The youngest got his because my friend sold me his 16 GB 2nd gen Touch for $125 when he got an iPhone. My oldest son just got his 16 GB 2nd gen for Christmas (we bought a refurbished unit from the Apple web site).
I like the iPod Touch. I watch all my video podcasts on iTunes on my PC, but I don’t know if I would do that on an iPod. I never did like watching podcasts on my Zune. So podcasts are not part of this. I mention it because I have let iTunes see my music library, and it would not be hard to use it for syncing to an iPod.
However, I have all my music rated in the Zune software, and not in iTunes. And of course they are not compatible rating systems, so I can’t rate them in both. And I have all my playlists in the Zune as well.
The iPod Classic has too small a screen for the amount of video I watch on my player. The iPod Touch and Zune HD have very nice screens. I would require at least 32 GB, which puts me at $299 for the iPod Touch and $289 for the Zune HD in that capacity. I could go to the iPod Touch with 64 GB for $399, but that is just too much money. At least I could keep all my music on it.
There is no compelling reason to go with one or the other.
Oh yea… apps. I knew you were thinking of that. Well, my youngest son only payed for half of his iPod Touch, so we were supposed to share it. 9 out of 10 of any of the apps I ever looked at were worthless offline. I don’t have WiFi at work, and it is hit and miss out in the real world. I never could get into using the iPod Touch in the house. None of the apps I cared about were meaningful in the house. They really need the iPhone.
This would not be a problem if Apple would just let Sprint have a version of the iPhone.
Which do I get? I hate the idea of getting an iPod Touch for the hope someday of getting an iPhone. But the Zune HD costs $40 more and has less than half the capacity of my Zune 80 I bought two years ago.
Am I missing an affordable media player option?
