The two computer-giants Microsoft and Apple have never been great friends and never pretended to. With the statement of Microsoft-developer J. Allard “The revolution of digital music-entertainment begins now” yet another battle was opened. What was called the “iPod-killer” in media has the name of Zune and was invented as an answer to Apples goldmine, the iPod-family. Since 14th of November Zune is available on the American market and will be launched in Europe in the end of 2007.

Microsoft’s Zune is a 30GB digital media player which stores up to 7.500 songs, 25.000 pictures or 100 hours of video. Those can be seen on a 3-inch LCD video screen that works in portrait or landscape mode. On top of that, Zune has a built in FM tuner which also allows one to see the name of the song currently playing on selected frequencies. But the main idea of Zune is, to equip a mobile device with send and receive-features. That means that everybody can share music and videos with each other. Music and photos can be passed over via WLAN. As a central feature of Zune, this transfer of music in between two Zune-players had to face the most critics within the last weeks: Added in the files there also is a DRM-protection being passed. It makes sure that temporary songs can maximally be played three times within the next three days. Afterwards the files delete themselves.

With Zune-users giving teasers to their friends, Microsoft hopes to create a more succesfull online music-download shop where songs can be bought easily. Yet another attack to Apples market leadership with its iTunes store. At the moment though, Apple has the advantage of offering about three times more titles than Microsoft.

Although Zune was launched quite strategically before Christmas, the big run failed to appear. Still more iPods are bought and Steve Jobs can sleep calmly. Whereas Zune has a lot of comparable features to the iPod, the design is not one of it. With the large display the Microsoft version is still about 60 percent bigger and 17 percent heavier than the iPod. The latter one also appears richer coloured. By now Zune can only be bought in black, white and brown. The cost are about 250 Dollars – which equals a 30GB iPod.

If Steve Jobs wants to keep his sleep though, he should not underestimate the new competitor on the market. Microsoft has a record of creating copy products with a slow start but in the end, they dominated the market.

If you want to know more about Zune visit the official homepage: www.zune.net

For deeper review check www.engadget.com