So my new mp3 player arrived last week. Along with the player itself, the Matchstick folks also sent along an AC adapter (handy!) and the premium headphones. The first thing I did: unbox all the little tidbits and install the software. I still haven't tried the headphones but they'll come up in a later installment I'm sure.

My laptop, which acts as my main PC is pretty handy but it's a bit on the slow side so while installing the software, I decided I needed to do some more work so I brought my Eee in for action.


The install of the software itself had a few speedbumps. For some reason, my last WindowsXP update didn't work quite 100% and after a bit of hair pulling, I decided to reboot. That seemed to fix the problem and the software installed without a glitch. I'm pretty impressed with the install. The Zune software migrated in all of my music, along with the podcast feeds from iTunes so I was set to go from the beginning. I had a minor freakout when the player wouldn't turn on. I figured it would come partially charged as most of these things do but not this one. I had to charge it before I could actually check it out.

It sat on the counter for 2 hours charging at which point I checked started my first sync. First things first, I deleted all of the pre-loaded material and started adding music, podcasts and a few photos. The software is fairly intuitive and I didn't have to read any of the instructions on how to use it.


The player itself is pretty nifty. It's a little longer than my iPod but now that I've been using it for a few days, I admit I like the shape of it. It fits nicely into my hand when I'm walking though it's taken a bit of getting used to not being able to squeeze it into some of my pockets - mostly my fault because I'm using some fairly big headphones with a large headphone jack plug.

The other thing I did almost immediately was set up the software at work. I refused to do this with my iPod because iTunes seems to slow down the computers when I run it and the sync on multiple computers has always been a bit troublesome for me. The Zune was no problem. I've added all of my podcasts and set up my Zune as a guest device which lets me add the downloaded shows without losing any of the data already on the device. Very nice.

I'm really liking the basic usages of the device. It's doing all I was doing with my iPod and more than that, I'm able to listen to the radio too. I still haven't tested any of the more advanced settings like uploading video or photos or trying the wireless sync but for the time being, I'm a pretty happy and impressed camper.