It's no iPod killer, but I guess it's a start

I figured Wild Willie might be interested in this, since he's a big supporter of Windows Media Player and .wma format for his audio files.

Microsoft finally unveiled their long-rumored foray into the portable mp3 market with the Zune. It looks pretty nice (and suspiciously reminiscent of an iPod), although that thing that looks like a click wheel really isn't, at least in the Apple sense of the word.

Some of it's features look promising, such as included wi-fi and the ability to share songs with other players. If I understand this right, you can share ANY song on your Zune player, including ones you bought off their upcoming Zune online music service. After three days, the song somehow becomes unplayable and asks if you want to buy it online. Actually kind of a neat feature considering all the proponents for extinct services like Napster and Kazaa always seemed to argue that the reason music should be available to share for free was so they could listen to new music and try it out first before they went to Best Buy and bought the CD.

The new music service will also feature a subscription service just like Scootypuff has been pretty fond of. Hopefully, the interface will be as easy as iTunes, and not the disaster that the now defunct Sony Connect service was.

I don't know about a mere 30 GB of memory, though. Considering Wander has a 60 GB iPod and is already hurting for more hard drive space, I can't imagine you'd be fitting many episodes of Lost or The Office on a Zune. All in all, my money is still with Apple, but I'm glad Microsoft might be coming out with a product that can keep the pressure on Steve Jobs to continue to innovate. And if the rumors are true, he's already got this thing beat cold with a video iPod in development sporting an even larger screen with a virtual click wheel.