Zune Review: Zune DRM System is Flexible

Jason from Gizmodo just posted his Zune Review. Overall, the same comments we saw from the other Zune reviews but e managed to grab a few interesting points:

A friend can take his Zune over to your computer, set up a "guest" relationship with your Zune Marketplace software (as opposed to a regular owner relationship), and you're free to drag songs and pictures from your library onto her device. These songs do not have the 3 play 3 day limit on them. Depending on whether you purchased or you're leasing these songs, you can do this with either 5 or 2 Zunes, respectively. So in essence, if your wife wants to grab a few songs off your library for listening to, she can.

That is what we were talking about in our post on the “Zune Terms of service agreement”. We really like the idea that you easily and legally sync more than one Zune with the same content. Flexibility in the DRM licence is what users are expecting when they legally buy digital content.

A cool feature that iTunes doesn't have is pre-rated, or community rankings. When you buy songs from the store, you'll notice that they already come pre-ranked on a scale of 5 blue stars. When you rank a song, it'll rank it in orange stars. What's the deal? Well, these blue stars are decided based on an algorithm combining other people's rankings, the song's popularity, and editorial rankings. If your library is bigger than the total space on the Zune, the Zune suite will auto-sync your library to your player based on these auto-rankings.

The future success of iTunes and Zune is based on the Content discovery capacities of their respective system. Having the best mp3 player is important but having the easiest way of discovering new music is even a better selling point. Apple is focusing a lot on that and Microsoft is doing the same thing with the Zune sharing feature.

We also learned from the Gizmodo Zune review that Microsoft has a team knowledgeable music folks who are going to be providing original text content for the marketplace. They will be in charge of the ranking albums and songs. They are the guys who will make your life easier when it’s time to discover new bands!

via Gizmodo