So now there are TWO big-name music players vying for supremacy in the devices-to-stick-in-your-ears market? What a pain. Okay, you only stick part of it in your ears. 

For anyone who has been hiding under a rock for the past couple years, the Apple iPod is the music playing device (calling it an MP3 player isn’t entirely accurate anymore) that set the standard – it uses a miniature hard drive as opposed to flash memory, something that matters little to most people, but was one of the biggest factors in it’s absurd levels of success, partially if not mainly due to it’s vast amounts of storage space. Since it’s infancy, the iPod has dominated the market, and now in it’s fifth generation and moving on just recently to the sixth (the touch-screen model), it shows no signs of slowing down. The iPod delivers up to 80GB (for the $350 US model) of high quality music and is supported by the largest online music library in existence – even if 99 cents a song is still an outrage. The software that supports it, iTunes, is fairly reliable even on Windows based machines, and is old enough that most if not all the bugs have already been worked out of the system.

The Zune is the new kid on the street, and luckily for it, it comes packing a decent punch. The Zune model is comparably priced to the standard model iPod, at $250 US, has a larger screen (though it should be noted that despite the increase in size, the resolution is the same – 450x350 for both players), a more user-friendly interface, Wi-fi compatibility and the ability to share music with friends wirelessly (More on this later – it isn’t as nice as it sounds like it is), as well as a handy FM tuner, for listening to your favorite local radio station. It is Windows based, so naturally Microsoft has gone all out with linking it to every possible device, including the Xbox 360, which you can use for streaming content along with your Zune. Anyone who isn’t a fan of the touch wheel on the iPod will enjoy the Zune’s more traditional browsing methods and arrow buttons as well.

Unfortunately, while it does have several fun features the iPod lacks, the Zune has it’s own array of issues. Microsoft’s music library (Media Player 11 users will have seen ‘Urge’ on their sidebars, as it is is called) is not as large as Apple’s, and it uses the same somewhat irritating point system that Xbox Live does, as opposed to iTunes’ somewhat simpler dollar prices. It is rather thicker and heavier than the iPod, and while the difference is only .8 oz, try holding both of them – the difference is noticeable, especially in a shirt pocket. The aforementioned file sharing is a nightmare of DMR (Digital Rights Management – Microsoft’s way of making sure no one is allowed to sidestep the absurdly high costs of digital media, Ruckus users will have encountered this repeatedly) based restrictions – shared songs can only be played a few times on a friend’s player. Also, your friend obviously has to have a Zune to do this, and in a market still firmly dominated by iPods, you’ll have to look closely at your friends. Ironically, despite being Windows-based, the Zune software runs slower than iTunes and actually has far more crashes and bug problems.

The Zune is a good device, and anyone who is really looking to link all their things together in a web of Microsoft-based Wi-fi will probably want to pick one up just for the compatibility, but anyone who is on the fence should really stick with the established champion – the software has fewer bugs, there is a larger and simpler library, and so long as you actually like the wheel, it handles very smoothly, like a nice luxury car. We’ll wait and see what the 2nd generation Zune brings with it, but for now the market seems to have spoken correctly – the iPod wins. It doesn’t do anything new and exciting, but it does exactly what it’s supposed to, and that’s all you need.

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