Sorry for the horrible picture – but with 1.3 Megapixels on an SDA, no flash and my family trying to accomplish something on a Sunday afternoon minutes before a Broncos game … well you aren’t going to get an Ansel Adams.

 So joy of joys, I got 5 minutes with a Zune at of all places – Super Target. Now, my wife considers me a glass is half empty type of person. I personally think the thing always empty and I’m looking for someone to add some freaking water to it … but in this case I think my glass actually got more taken away from it than got added.

 
So far it appears to be everything thing I thought it was going to be. The brown is really brown. Like brown in a non-pleasant brown. I guess I should quantify this a little – I’m a bit of an HGTV fan. I think the shows that help you improve the value of your house, how to decorate and generally make things look good with other things in the room, or how to flip a house are great. Problem is now I see everything in a "how-would-this look if" kind of way. The first thought that I had when I saw the brown was I wonder how that would look in my back yard on the ground. Maybe microsoft is hoping brown will grow on some people. There used to be a lot of (70′s) electronics that came in brown/woodgrain, but let’s not fool ourselves. This is not that kind of cool brown. Heck it’s not even retro brown. This is cheap Dollar Store plastic truck brown. 

 Moving on. Black. YAY! Now that’s more like it. So what did I think? I thought not bad. But I also thought a couple other things, like why even bother putting the round scroller type thing on the front if it is completely non-functional? I can’t tell you how many times I (in 5 minutes) tried to navigate the menus by rotating the non-existent scroller. Up goes up, down goes down … circle goes "not an iPod moron".

In all – I honestly thought this was a cheap knockoff of an iPod by someone who didn’t want to get sued for using some Apple patented ideas. The menu system, the look, everything felt cheap knock off that’s you’d find for 1/2 the price on eBay. I will give them one thing – The screen was great. The more PDA sized screen and the orientation was wonderful. I think the screen itself could have been better (it seems fuzzy and pixilated compared to a iPod or the Samsung i320 I just reviewed, but in all I think this was the one redeeming factor of the device. If it rotates to play video … they might have a chance at having a hit, simply does to the oversized (comparitively) screen.

 Oh – and as for being the next big thing… I’m personally didn’t see it. I saw about 10 different sets of people walk right by it without a second glance (many off to other players.)