You know, I'm pretty sure all the snarkiness and negative nancy-ish behavior on this journal paints me in a negative light, but in real life, I'm a pretty decent person. I don't find faults in most things (except things that I work on). That said, let me say tell you a little story.

A few nights ago, Woot was having a sale on Zunes for $150. I figured, "Hey, $150 is *just* about what I want to risk on a potential dud ... why not!" I mean, I figured given that I had lost a few months' income on the recent stock market sliding (yay volatile stocks!), I figured dropping $150 on a Microsoft piece of hardware might not be such a bad move.

WRONG.

I never really thought the iTunes was a particularly good piece of software (I still use Winamp), but man ... they blow this Zune piece of crap software out of the WATER.

Here is a short list of things that happen with the Zune software so far:

1. It froze when it tried to get updates ... the very first time I popped in the CD. Nice.
2. It was stuck on "Installing Zune software ... 95% done" for close to ten minutes. It wouldn't let me quit, so I was forced to switch computers. Double nice.
3. It currently asked me to install firmware on the Zune ... "good idea," I thought ... and now it's stuck on "Waiting for device to update..." Meanwhile my Zune is happily just sitting here. Triple nice.

Apparently nobody on the Zune team understood that Microsoft wrote the operating system that is required for this forsaken thing to work, cause they apparently decided to reinvent the wheel by forcing me to use a shitty ripoff of iTunes.

Here's a screenshot of the interface:

No, wait that's the interface! That's the interface crashing! Ooops! My mistake!

Ok, so I just cancelled the firmware update and now I seem to be caught in a weird situation: my Zune reports that it's connected, but the Zune software says I need to "Connect a Zune device." Which one is it big boy? One of you says "No good", the other says "good." This reminds me of the times when 3 people report a bug about Deki Wiki, and Max steadfastly says "Works on my machine!" triumphantly. (hah, kidding! max is awesome!)

Which is it, big boy?

Le sigh.

I can't remember being this frustrated with a piece of hardware and software before. I bought one of the first Rios ever (32 megs, baby!), and I don't remember being as frustrated with getting songs onto it as I feel now.

So even at a discounted price of $150, given that I can't even get music on this goddamn thing, I'd say I just failed at life. Maybe I would have been better off buying some sub-prime mortgage stocks or something (oh wait, I did! HAH!).

My final review: Microsoft Zune: Whatever off my ballz, plz (max coined this phrase when he got annoyed with me today, i think it's super catchy)

Update: I can't even launch Zune the software to sync anything. Which really means this Zune is abso-fucking-lutely useless. Awesome.

This is a great way to inspire confidence.

This is now what my screen looks like when I launch the Zune software (I alt+tabbed out and tried to alt+tab back in):