The War Continues

So the Apple vs. Microsoft war continues with Microsoft's announcement of the Zune HD. The iPod Touch competitor was announced yesterday with mixed reviews. I was intrigued by the HD attachment on the Zune title. So I decided to take a closer look into. My first thought was an HD screen... nope. Granted you will be able to view HD content from the Zune but only when it is connected to an external HD monitor or television. Hmmm, not too exciting to me since I have Directv with HD and a Blu-Ray player. The screen itself on the player is a mere 480 x 272 resolution OLED display.

So that can't quite possibly be the only reason they added the HD to the name. Apparently it also has a built in FM HD receiver so you can listen to HD radio. Anyone who is techie enough to go out and buy a Zune HD is not going to listen to HD radio on it. Frankly radio is on its way out with its commercial ridden programing especially when there are so many music players out there as well as XM and Sirius satellite radio. Well thats strike two in my book.

Now granted I haven't had the chance to actually play with one yet. So I can't really say whether it will be a good tech toy or not. They have a steep hill to climb to compete with the iPod Touch since Apple has there nice little patent on the touch screen technology. I still have not found any touch screen device and OS that works as smoothly as the iPod Touch and iPhone. So from preliminary research all I can say is that it at least looks sharp.

All in all we will have to wait and see. My money is on Apple continuing its domination. I was told by Jeremy not to blog about this since he didn't want to start a whole Apple vs. Microsoft debate with fans of the site... to bad :)