Hello Zune!

I haven't 'reported' it yet but just a few days after I replaced my iPod battery, the hard drive croaked. It started making the dreaded 'clicking' noises. I did try a few tricks like disconnecting the hard drive from the motherboard, shaking and slapping it a few times but it was lost cause. Needless to say, I did order a replacement hard drive for $40 new online and will get that back up and running, but in the interim I am glad I took advantage of the 30Gb Brown Zune that Buy.com had on their website.

I actually ordered it about a month ago but they were backordered so I just got the delivery yesterday. This Zune was an amazing $99! Normal retail is about $150 or so. Why was this so cheap? From all the podcasts and tech blogs I've been reading its simply because of the color; yeah, color. Anyway, I got this baby unboxed and setup within 20 minutes on my system. What's the difference between this and my old iPod? Weel, unlike my old 3rd Generation iPod, this baby has wireless (for sending and receiving files between friends), video playback (for playing whatever video content you can send to it; I'll get to that in a bit), photo viewer, podcasts compliant as well as the capability of playing your normal music files.

The main reason I got this (aside from the price) was the fact that I'll be able to transfer video to this. I figured the little ones can use it in the car on long trips as well as I can break it in on my upcoming trip to Jamaica. I did some research/Googling on this and found a few ways to rip and transfer video files to this device. I'll soon have this thing loaded with movies as well as TV episodes that I've downloaded.

Battery life is supposed to be better than the iPods, so this device should make a nice little portable media player!