All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Although you can't buy it yet, Microsoft has gone public with details about its much-anticipated Zune MP3 player. It'll hold 30GB of music in the MP3, AAC, and WMA formats, with a Wi-Fi connection that will let you send songs directly to other Zune users. They get three free listens of the song, after which they'll have to purchase the song a la carte, or, if they're a "Zune Pass" subscriber, download it free of charge as part of their monthly subscription plan. This could lead to a viral adoption of the player; if two of your friends have a Zune, you might be convinced to join them after watching them zap recommended songs back and forth.
The Zune supports on-the-go playlist creation, lets you play slideshows as you listen to music, plays WMV, MPEG-4, and H.264 videos, receives FM radio, and comes in white, black, or brown, as I reported here earlier. An optional car kit comes with an "FM tuner," which I take to mean "transmitter" (the Zune has a tuner built in), which auto-seeks the channel with the least interference for playing music over your car stereo.
The player will sync not with Windows Media Player, but with as-yet-unreleased Zune software that will be able to import unprotected MP3s, WMAs, and AACs from Windows Media Player or iTunes. It doesn't look like Microsoft will be offering a voucher system to let people trade in their iTunes collections for the same songs in a Zune format, as I thought it might, although Zune owners can put iTunes-purchased AACs on there after un-DRMing them with QTFairUse6.
The device's screen measures a full 3 inches diagonally, and can be toggled between portrait and landscape mode. It'll ship with pre-loaded music and videos from DTS, Astralwerks, Virgin, Ninja Tune, Playlouderecordings, Quango Music Group, Sub Pop Records, and V2/Artemis Records.
More pics and details are available here; there's still no word on when the Zune will be available, how long its battery will last (especially important for the Wi-Fi feature) or the prices of the player, songs, or subscriptions.
