Last week Woot was offering a refurbished 30GB Zune for $99 (black or white models) so I finally leaped since I was hoping for a black when they first started offering the white model for $20 more. I received the Zune on Wednesday and so far I’m liking it. As for being refurbished, I’m not sure what was wrong with it since it looks as if it’s brand new. The casing and screen are in perfect condition and the default load was installed. Could be Microsoft attempting to unload stock with the new model around the corner.

Using the Zune software and installation was just as easy (actually it was a tad easier) than installing iTunes. The Zune completed firmware updates and downloaded and installed the latest version rather than installing the older version on the CD, requesting a reboot and then notifying me that there are updates available (as iTunes typically does to me).

The only thing that I haven’t been happy with (and it’s probably user error since I’ve only spent 10-15 minutes with it) is dragging and dropping an m3u playlist. iTunes grabs the playlist, puts it in iTunes and you can drop the playlist to your iPod and it’s updated and ready to go. I tried the same with the Zune and it moved the files and loaded them to the Zune but didn’t add the playlist (which is meticulously sorted through Excel). The other item that I’m attempting to figure out is how it grabs music since it didn’t “offer” me to add music, it added everything I had on my laptop to the Zune.

Hopefully these items are easy to overcome after having more than 15 minutes to work with it.

The interface on the actual player doesn’t have the iPod jog dial but it took me a matter of 5 seconds to figure out all the navigation. The Zune’s navigation is intuitive and not rocket science, so if you base your purchase of an iPod based on the jog dial, well you have other problems to deal with (and I have seen those comments about how all other mp3 players can’t compete because of that one feature). I also think the jog dial on the iPod is very cool but honestly it took me no more time to fire up the pre-installed music and videos on the Zune and to back out. Probably the worst part was trying to use it as a jog dial since I’m use to my Nano.

The rundown:

• The player is visually nice and I like the matted black cover.
• The display is clean and displays well.
• The picture slide show is nice but I didn’t see an option to allow it to cycle pictures while listening to music (like Media Center allows on the Xbox 360, XP/MCE and Vista). I probably wouldn’t use this feature outside of showing someone pictures while listening to something.
• Easy navigation (even without the jog dial).
• Wireless sync is coming soon.
• While I wouldn’t mind having a 160GB player, this was $99 and well worth it!

I’m still working with the software and I’ll drop some more on it after I’ve had more time to work with it. I’m specifically looking for playlist conversion (to pull a m3u from my mp3 server and have it pull the songs from there to sync). I did find tonight the ability to specify the folders it searches in which should help on it deciding to sync items that I don’t want on it. It also didn’t sync my pictures folder from the laptop even after verifying that the path was listed on the player. My other test I’ll do this weekend is hooking it up directly to the Xbox 360 to see how it handles/recognizes it.