Man, that mock-up image is just cruel. I looked at it and was immediately excited. Looks pretty authentic.

I am currently using the Zune 120 and I am still not disappointed by it, but I think I will ditch that one when this one comes out hopefully it will have some massive storage capabilities since 32 just isn't enough for me.

Was there any talk on how much longer the zune 30 will be supported?

nice... man with all the mp3s comming out of the horizon I cant sleep.. first the sony x 1000, p3, S9, now a new zune?? holy smokes.. year of the mp3 players??? Im so excited for these device to be reviewed

@hawkshot as far as i know they have no plans to discontinue support for the Zune 30. I think its safe to say that they will continue to update the firmware.

That was such a tease! :) I thought, "Damn! That is one slick device you got there!" Heck, you even have it on a desk with another shadowy figure of some kind and I thought, "Wow!" Hopefully, the Zune team can take some pointers from your fine modeling!

Hopefully the "new hardware" will be something with a larger capacity than 120GB. These stupid little flash players are pissing me off...if you're a serious music fan, what's the point?

A 250 gig player like the Archos might have a smaller potential market, but I think it would be one of the few ways Microsoft (or anyone) could compete against Apple, by appealing to the music and movie geeks who would love larger capacity players and aren't concerned about how 'pretty' the device looks or how clever the commercials are.

The Zune isn't that different than an iPod. The way for it to survive is to be the "real music fans'" media player, with a massive hard drive, OGG/FLAC/etc support (and equally diverse video codec support) and other music-geek-centric features that Apple isn't smart enough to think of.

"These stupid little flash players are pissing me off...if you're a serious music fan, what's the point?"

Question... do you think Roger Ebert carries around his entire movie collection with him? :-)

Yeah, 250GB, enough to let you listen to music 24/7 without repeats for the next 173 days.

Really? You have that much music? Would you die if you gasp, had enough capacity for 2 weeks instead of 173 days?

Bunch of whiners.

Geez, I'd be happy just to have them available (officially) in Australia... as I'm sure the rest of the world does too.

We already get pwned with Xbox Live, at least give us a little joy, even if we don't have a localised Marketplace just yet, at least let us buy them...

What's the point of keeping lossless music in portable music devices? An affordable but well-built DAC connected to a PC/laptop or a hifi reciever is always going to sound better than any PMPs out there. Mind you, whenever portability comes into play you are already paying the price of sound fidelity: instead of better components, you have to use smaller, pricier and more often than not, lower quality ones in order to afford portability and minimum power consumption. It is simply not worth listening to lossless music through portable devices because the real improvement in SQ over e.g. well-encoded, extreme quality VBR MP3 (which is still several times smaller than a compressed lossless format, like FLAC) is so miniscule to be detected in a meaningful way (read: scientifically).

I just did an inventory on my new 4GB Creative Zen. Most of the audio on there is 160kb WMA. There's about 30 CDs (counting 3 or 4 with only 5 or 6 songs), 2 podcasts, 6 articles turned into audio with text-to-speech, 73 full-resolution (1280x1024) pictures, 5 hour-long television programs (commercials removed) and 2 half-hour programs (no commercials)with 104MB still free. There's definitely more media on there than could be played on one charge of the battery, meaning it'd have to be hooked up to the PC again anyway at that point.

I also checked a directory I have on my hard drive where I've pre-encoded movies and tv programs for quick uploading to the Zen. In there at the moment are (all with commercials removed): 2 half-hour programs, 36 hour programs, and 7 movies. These encoded files take up about 13.3 GB of space. Assuming 22 minutes, 45 minutes, and 90 minutes respectively, 13.3 GB translates into 38 hours 14 minutes of video. Steve, you're arguing that 120GB isn't enough? Even if your comment is taken to mean that flash players don't have enough storage, the largest flash players have 32GB. Heck, my figures indicate that if I had a 16GB Zen, I could put more than 38 hours of video on it when it only plays an estimated 5 hours on a single charge. I can just imagine what the storage-to-playtime ratio would be for audio.

I'm not sure features alone are enough to beat the iPod in sales. One could argue that players like some Archos and Cowon models (new Archos tablets, A2/A3, etc.) have the last space and codec support but haven't dominated the marketplace because of it yet.

I just hope the Zune team isn't sitting around saying "You know what the Zune needs? More cowb- I mean, larger fonts!"
I freely admit I've never owned a Zune, but at least interface-wise, all the UI pictures I've seen seem to feature a freakishly large font with a white-on-black color scheme... like, say, here:
http://osakasteve.com/2007/10/11/new-zune-ui-is-downright-luscious/

I've got no sense of aesthetics, but maybe if they're looking for changes, they could make it look a bit more... modern... colorful... attention-grabbing. If I didn't know it was a Zune, looking at the first part of that Zune 2 demo would lead me to think it was some generic asian MP4 player retrofitted with CGA graphics. :-)

As a Zune owner (who is looking to migrate to an iphone 32gb this June), the best thing Microsoft can do for their player, if it's to survive is not to play Apple's game.

Why offer a me-too, closed system proprietary player?

Although due to MS's thick-headedness they'll never do this, I say, open the player up. Make it software agnostic. Allow MTP and Universal Mass Storage connection. Add open source codecs like FLAC and Ogg. Oh, and it needs a wifi browser. Weather you feel YOU need it or not, that's where the market is going. Wi-fi is now not only available in cafes and airports; entire towns, at least here in NY state, are adopting wi-fi antennas. Imagine driving to your supermarket and your player could update you on which market has the best items on sale this week, or wireless downloads of your podcasts while you drive to work.

The Holidays are a long way away, by that time will anyone still care that's the problem, sales are lagging, stores like target are dumping inventory, by Nov it could be all over for the zune. Especially when Apple will more than likely be doing it's own Hardware refresh.

I had a Zune 120 for about a day, returned it the next day. Loved the machine, but I need eq. If they put an eq on the next version, I'm a customer. And not just lousy presets. I want user custom eq. Not every headphone is made equal. (and to those who are about to tell me that if you have good headphones you don't need eq, whatever. I have shure e4 and 420's. I still need my eq.

im confused about something: when you pay the 15$ per month zune subscription fee, are you paying for actual downloads that you can keep, or does the music disapear after you stop paying?

Unless MS chooses to add East Asian font support, they are not going to get my money! I gave up on them after 2 generations of hardware (and software) only to learn from MS themselves that they will not add Japanese, Korean, and Chinese support until the Zune is released in the those respective areas.

Hmmmmm. Every other player (even SONY!!!) has unicode support. Go figure.