Last week, I got a Zune HD, and I have once again been amazed by Microsoft’s ability to make a great device.
Visually, it’s an eye-pleasing gadget. All of the buttons are either flush or only stick out by about a millimeter or two, creating a clean “slate” appearance. The back of the Zune isn’t rounded like the iPod Touch, but a flat-sided hexagon. The back is brushed metal, with the screws showing on each corner, with a black strip of plastic at the very bottom of the back.
There are also some usability features that make the Zune HD a better device than the earlier models of Zune. For instance, the headphone jack is on the bottom of the device, so if you rest it on the table while writing blog posts, you don’t have to be constantly turning it around to switch songs. It’s already aligned the way you need it to. Due to the “HD” aspect ratio of the screen, all of my widescreen videos will play and take up the whole screen of the device without any letterboxing. My most used feature, however, is the button that I call the controller button. It’s on the side of the Zune, and when pressed it brings up all the media controls: play, pause, volume, next/previous song. It will even activate when the screen is locked, so I don’t have to make the device use its beautiful screen for longer than I need it to.
The biggest differentiator that Microsoft has been trying to sell the Zune HD on is its screen. It uses an OLED display, which creates a high-contrast gorgeous picture. Microsoft coupled this technology with a design decision to make the User Interface based around a black background with white text and/or pictures, which just makes the foreground objects pop. I was curious how OLED screens worked though, since I had heard that they also are supposed to give better battery life to portable devices, so I looked them up on Wikipedia.
A large differentiator between OLED and LCD is that OLEDs have no backlight. Each LED emits light on its own and just will not turn on when a pixel that LED is lighting needs to be black. This is what creates the high picture quality because there is no light behind each color that washes them out. Also, the O in OLED stands for Organic, which leaves opportunities wide open for OLED displays to be on surfaces other than gadgets. Think t-shirts with screens, or paper that lights up. Apparently, OLED displays do not last as long as traditional displays due to the organic nature of the display. For instance, blue OLEDs have a life-span of 14,000 hours (five years at 8 hours a day). This is not as large a disadavantage for portable media players such as the Zune because there will be a newer and better version of the device well before the screen loses quality. Also, all PMPs with screens have a screen-shut off timer when playing music so even if you use the Zune HD for 8 hours, you’re likely only using the screen for a maximum of 1 hour if you’re also doing some web-browsing or use some apps.
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