Gadgetory

penniman from TechnoBuffalo and this is an extensive walkthrough of the zune HD interface we're going to cover pretty much everything except for the internet and the social part of the zune HD we're going to save that for later videos so let's start by turning on the device taking it out of standby and the unlock sequence is quite simple you just lift up the window shade kind of like you do on the on some Android devices so we bring that up and let's zoom in on the screen so the home screen of the zune HD is what you're looking at right now and there's actually two on the screens one on the left and one on the right and you're going to notice the graphics of the zune HD are fantastic the the NVIDIA Tegra platform really brings things to life video looks great music is is beautiful it's really a celebration of multimedia I think on the zune HD compared to say the ipod touch where it's kind of like a multi-function app device with multimedia with the internet with email and everything in between the zune HD is very focused on multimedia now if you tap on this button here you can actually jump from side to side let me just take you through what you have on the left here here we have something called pins it's kind of like a favorite music section so you can add any album to the pins or a song or something right now I just have this album here and it's playing through the headphones let's go back and this shows you history things that you've done recently so in the upper left corner is the recent most thing I've listened to or watched or played with so here we can see that I've listened to a radio station I had some albums I was looking at some pictures that were on the device if we go down we can see the things that I've recently added to my zune HD so recently I've added a teaser from the office a teaser from heroes now the TV shows and then I have some pictures that i've i've added recently a new photo gallery that is a calculator chess game new CD you can basically go back through your history and see what you've been doing on your zune which is a great feature to kind of go back and listen to the same track you were on yesterday and so on and so forth so this main menu is a self explanatory it shows you music and videos and pictures and we're going to drill into all of those now let's go into music zune has a really interesting option for listening to music or for buying music so-called zune pass it's fifteen dollars a month that lets you download unlimited music to your zune and to your computer you don't own the music but for as long as you pay 1499 a month you get to listen to the music which i think is a really good deal it's a really good tool for music exploration so you could download 50 60 100 thousand albums in a month if you want to and just listen to all the music you want that said if you decide to change to the ipod touch well that music kind of goes away because you're not paying for the zune pass anymore but also with the zune pass you get to own 10 tracks a month of those that you've downloaded so that could be good right now that sort of screen savers coming on so we can sort by artists playlists songs genre and albums and we can also swipe to the right or swipe to the left to get to these areas so let's go to albums and let's go to Radiohead so we get a beautiful animation and it comes up on the screen now I can swipe to the right to go to the next track or I can tap down here to bring up the tracklist very beautiful transitions and animations and from here I can tap on any of these and play them and right now it's playing now you saw the screen saver so let me wait a second you're going to see it come up on the screen and here it comes so kind of sliding across the screen it tells you the name of the album which is ok computer and you can have it also same the name of the track obviously the screen is going to shut off in a few seconds to save battery life but really awesome looking screensaver now for play controls you can tap the button on the left side and this is the standard played controls you get so you can increase the volume decrease the volume skip to the next track go back or press pause now you also get this menu in a few other areas if I tap outside of the album art I will get that as well and like I mentioned you can this button at any time whether you're playing a game or you're watching a video to get that on the screen to adjust the play controls so let's go back artists audioslave a very quick interface again we can flick back and forth this way or we can tap down here and we always press on the top in this corner to go back to the previous menu very intuitive we can add it as a favorite we can put it on repeat or have it on shuffle very nice implementation of music on the zune HD really lets you see the album art and experience the music in a very intimate way that I don't feel like you get so much on the ipod touch let's go to videos I've put two videos on here right now beyond the one that comes on here out of the factory it's just a preview or teaser of the office and it's in high definition so if i had the cable i can plug it in to an HDTV and get 720p video output but i can tell you looking at it right now it's beautiful if we tap on the screen we get those play controls that i mentioned right now the camera is having trouble focusing on that and we can make it louder or softer go to the next video or the next actually we're jumping ahead in the scene okay so let's go to pictures and I am going to go to some of the pictures that I put in here recently I added these pictures and let me the accelerometer works extremely fast look at that very fast we can flick to the side like we can on the ipod touch we can zoom in like so zooms very fast rear enders extremely fast then we can tap on the screen and press play for a nice little slideshow you get the point and pictures really really pop on this oled screen it's it's really beautiful so let's go back and go back again and of course you can sort by date or folder or many different ways if you have a lot of pictures on your device you can really keep them organized let's go into radio this has HD radio capability which is an interesting technology basically it's higher fidelity radio and if you have a car that has HD radio you know that you also get some data on the screen so the radio will tell you what song is playing right now similar to RDS if you're familiar with that let me see if I can pull up an HD radio station now so I'm going to have its can no that's not HD radio this is a think we have some HD radio back here actually I have placed a little shortcut in here there we go looks like it's not coming through as HD right now because I'm in a area whether it's not good signal what's really neat about the zune HD radio is that you can pause live radio and that's a really innovative feature so it has a few seconds buffer where it will kind of save it start storing it to memory then you can go back and play it when you're ready to listen so a great way to experience radio that I don't think we've seen on any other devices and from here we can add this to a favorite or remove it to a favorite marketplace is where you go to get apps and right now there are a very very limited selection of apps see it says not connected is trying to connect and here are the apps there aren't that many there are about you know half a dozen apps microsoft says there will be some high quality games Twitter application a facebook application there won't be an SDK for the zune HD in the near future meaning developers can't develop their own applications put them on the zune HD they're going to be in-house applications for the time being which is unfortunate it's never going to have all of the apps that the ipod touch does at least for the near term so let's go back to the home screen so we go back to market place we can download music right from here because I have the zune pass I can download any album right now and listen to it within a few minutes so right now here's new releases from a very a variety of artists I'm going to go to top songs of let's say top songs of rock let's see what we have here right now we're connected over Wi-Fi Kings of Leon Use Somebody okay so I'm going to tap on that I'm going to press add to cart yes and because i have zoom past it's technically free i'm going to go back at some more things to the cart let's go with this so i know not the song let's go to top albums let's go to pop black eye peas that's a very good album i'm going to add it add to cart and now download all and you can see where it says downloading downloading and it'll take about you know 15 minutes probably to download a full album maybe less depending on how fast your Wi-Fi connection is but you can see how fast this is going we're at forty percent already on this song and when we're done the song will be thrown right into our music library now fortunately the marketplace won't let you download video which is a shame you can only do applications and music and if we go into apps we can see the apps that I've downloaded so far only 3 the calculator is a very basic calculator let's look at the chess game and what's really annoying about some of these apps is that you get an advertisement while you're waiting sometimes it's actually a commercial a 15 second commercial I guess this is kind of out Microsoft is so now it's loading the apps are kind of slow I think they'll probably increase in speed with ROM upgrades so I'm gonna do single player I'm going to resume I was playing a game of chess earlier not doing so well and you get the point the graphics are okay it's a very simple game it works well but it's not the fastest let's go back to the home screen and you can see this is taking some time sometimes the zune HD gets a little laggy most of the time it's extremely fluid so we're going to skip social and Internet come back to that later and let's take a look at settings so there's not that many settings here we can go into Wireless turn on wireless see what networks are around I mean change the brightness of the display the time out the screensaver that you saw if it comes on which probably uses some battery we can make adjustments to the radio depending on where you live if we go into music we can actually turn on the equalizer what's annoying about this is that you don't get a drop-down list so if I'm flipping through and I want to get to the last one which is none I have to keep tapping this oh and see I just missed it so you can see why that's a little bit annoying you can't customize an equalizer clock you can change the time screen lock which is the thing you saw earlier you can enable a pin if you don't want someone picking up your zune and seeing the things you have on it internet settings are very minimal we're going to talk more about internet later change the language to french spanish or english and if we go to about you can kind of see how much space you're currently using on your device and how many pictures how many videos you have that sort of thing so overall I'm super impressed with the interface on the zune HD I think Microsoft and vidya whoever was involved with this did a really good job at making things super smooth super intuitive very well optimized for this small device with with us very sensitive screen and easy navigation very smooth transitions it's a lot of fun to use which is really important we'll be back more covering the internet expiry rants on the zune HD we'll also talk about social and do some comparisons with the ipod touch be sure to follow us on twitter for more twitter.com / TechnoBuffalo that's it for now