The Zune Experience

I bought my first Zune almost 18 months ago, the reason was I really liked the screen and loved the idea of music subscription. But soon after I received it I couldn’t subscribe to the Zune Marketplace using any of my US based cards. So I looked for their pre-paid cards but couldn’t find any on Amazon, target, Gamestop, Wal-mart and K-mart. It didn’t bother me much, I was planing to resolve the issue when I get back to Kuwait.

But 1 week after arriving to Kuwait I’ve lost my Zune 120, and thus having no reason to subscribe to the Zune Marketplace, until now.

I was trying out Bing a few weeks ago when I cam across a very good offer, $82 (after cashback) for an open box, factory refurbished Zune 8GB. I almost bought it instantly but remembered that I couldn’t subscribe to the service using my cards, I checked Amazon and saw that they had The Zune Pass available, so I bought 1 card instantly and then went back to Bing to get the player.

The day I got the Zune Pass I downloaded 10GB worth of music in 6 hrs, just because I can. I love the idea of all you can eat of music for $15 a month with 10 free DRM free songs per month, compared to iTunes new pricing of 1.29 for the high tier songs, thats $13 worth of songs free every month.

On the hardware side, the Zune 8gb goes head-to-head with the iPod Nano, and is surpasses it in every way in my opinion. Built-in wifi, radio and sharing music is just part of the Zune experience.

Bottom line is if you are even a casual music listener I recommend the Zune ecosystem $15 a month is equal to 1 album and you get free 10 DRM free songs and it beats downloading pirated songs cause you don’t have to worry about audio bit-rate, cover-art and indexing your songs.

P.S. I don’t recommend getting a Zune at the moment, The Zune HD is coming out in a few moths an it looks great.

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