are there any installation kits for the Zune like the Ipod2car kits?

 

AFAIK, there's currently nothing on the market, but the iPod third party manufacturers are starting to get Zune stuff out -- last I heard, Soundgate's supposed to come out with a Zune-specific device ~March timeframe.

 

You know somebody with a Zune?

 

yea woot.com has had them out every once in a while real cheap. do i know anyone personally, no

 

Well, me

Seriously, like most things Micro$oft, they don't get things right until the second or third generation, and then the 800 lb. gorilla beats up the rest of the market. While I'm not saying they're going to knock off Apple anytime soon, I believe you will soon start seeing a *lot* more Zunes and associated third-party accessories.

Why do I say this? When I needed to replace my iPod, I looked around the market with an open mind. I bought and returned an iPod Touch (a *great* device, BTW, with a slick interface -- I just coundn't justify $400 for a 16GB iPod which had a lot of additional functionality I thought I'd use, but turned out I didn't). Finally, I narrowed my choices down to a 2nd generation Zune 80 GB and the latest iPod Classic 80GB.

I purchased a 2d gen. Zune. Why? Because frankly the Zune is superior to the equivalent iPod -- better screen, built-in FM, wireless sync, tv-out via a dock, equal or better touch pad and menus, etc. -- enough better that I was willing to give up iTunes' superior (at least for now) catalog of music and willing to endure the wait for the aftermarket to produce car rigs like the iPod currently has available. It would have been nice to have the immediate car integration if I had gone with an iPod, but it didn't make sense to me to take a (IMO) lesser product for a couple/maybe few months' sooner car use -- especially since I have already have mp3 CD's I can play in the car in the interim.

So, in answer to your original question, yeah, some of us do, and a lot more will be soon.

 

Im in agreance i think we will see alot more zunes

hoenstly only reason i went ipod is i needed something with a dock connector cause I do lots of installs and need to be able to show customers how the ipod integrates

 

The iPod classic is surely an old tech device with its hardrive and smaller screen, bound to be discontinued soon. The only thing it doesn't have is the built-in FM. There are a million aftermarket ones if you want that feature among a hundred other features available. Wireless sync comes on some of the other models but is very slow compared to a wired one. The iPod classic screen has the same resolution as the Zune but with a slightly smaller size where the Touch version has 4 times the resolution and a larger size of either, along with wifi and 32gb of flash memory instead of a hardrive.

I'm not knocking your choice but with all the models you can get from Apple and 3rd party suppliers, I don't think they'll have to worry about Zunes any time soon. But I do understand that there will surely be some people who find the combination feature set of the Zune appealing. Particularly if you are not a Mac user. The iPods have a multitude of other features that are invisible to those who are not Mac users. Since Macs are outselling Dell and HP combined now, that just supports the case for the iPod even further.

 

I think you hit the nail on the head here. I'm a non-Mac guy (I have an old Ti G4 Powerbook, but it's on it's last legs, and only used for light surfing -- everything else I use is Windows Vista or XP, so I never see those other features).

Plus, something I forgot to mention is my office has me tethered to a Blackberry 8300, which gives me (painfuly slow) Internet access and a phone. Thus, the only hole in my electronic "portfolio" is a need/desire for a device for music/video/pictures. For this limited functionality, the Zune at $220 vs. the iTouch at $400 (and further with only 20% of the capacity) vs. the iPod Classic at $250 (with, IMO, an inferior feature set) was a no-brainer.

That said, ideally, if I had no other electronics (no Blackberry, no cell phone), I'd have an iPhone -- the display and interface is just *so* , I believe flash memory is *vastly* superior to fragile hard drives, and I could make do with only 16GB (8GB is just too small). But alas, that's not my world, and it's unlikely to be as long as I must have Blackberry-style e-mail access. So it's the Zune as the best fit for my current needs.

As you can tell, I'm not a fanboy for either camp -- this is one area that is *very* YMMV!

 

Although you can probably tell that I AM a fanboy, I DO understand that everybody's needs are different. I dont have one yet, but the new 32gb Touch is on my shopping list.

 

I'm waiting for this thing to come out. I hear rumors that it will be available in early June.
http://www.soundgate.com/index.php?r...usereferrer=1&

-c