We have our hands on a Zune. Although not yet launched in Australia, it’s possible to import the Microsoft Zune from the USA by buying it from an online store. Would we recommend this course of action before the official launch in mid 2007? Read on.

Zunelicious
We sampled the black Zune model, which is boxy, around the size and thickness of a packet of cigarettes, with rounded corners and a panel of semi-transparent plastic on the front face that surrounds the screen and switches which lets just a smidge of light through, creating an effect like blue frosted glass.

The Zune display uses an odd aspect ratio of 3:4 during normal operation, which is taller than an iPod display, but looks like a regular screen when you turn it on its side to view video files. Its peculiar tall dimensions make for better viewing of a long list of tracks, though. The circular interface plus pad doesn’t have any mystical touch-sensitive features – it’s merely a showy covering on a simple four-way switch.

The Zune background theme uses neat blurry images as a backdrop while you float through the responsive menus. There are three themes pre-loaded: a warm coloured set called Amber, a charcoal-tones set called Haze and a purplish set called Night. Like the iPod, the Zune displays the letter of the artist, album or song as you scroll through lists at pace.

The song-browsing interface is superior to Apple’s iPod. You’re given a pictorial view of album covers, which scrolls vertically by alphabet. However unlike the iPod, at the junction between two letters in your collection, say between T and U, the Zune will smoothly trail off the last item under T and continue through the first items in the U list seamlessly, which you can easily scroll backwards in granular detail, while the iPod strangely jumps to the beginning of all items starting with the letter T in the same situation. The FM Tuner function shows a neat pictorial view of the spectrum, auto-scanning between stations instantly by clicking left and right.

Credit-card region coding
Can you use the American Zune online marketplace from Australia? The short answer is no. During the process of creating an account, your location is determined from your credit card’s country of origin (Australia), and rejected. iTunes uses the same system to prevent Aussies from using their US service, which sells the latest movies and TV shows. This limits you to using the Zune as a stand-alone player for DRM-free WMA or MP3 tracks only. It also doesn’t support WAV files. Speaking of DRM, anything that you’ve already purchased from an online music retailer that’s encoded with Microsoft’s Plays For Sure DRM technology won’t play on a Zune. Plays For Sure is Microsoft’s DRM technology and player certification scheme that is in use by Napster, Rhapsody, Music Match and other retailers. We sympathize with anyone who plans on getting a Zune and has already bought legitimate, Microsoft DRM protected music for their Creative, SanDisk or other Plays For Sure-certified music player.

Microsoft Points
The Zune online sales are also rather suspicious due to what they call “Microsoft Points”. Like tokens at a carnival, these are purchased in blocks of 400 points, for US$5. The Black Eyed Peas album “Bridging the gap” allows purchase of each track for 79 points (US$0.98) each, or the entire album for 880 points (US$11). Again, note that Australians cannot buy music or points from the American service.

On the flipside, the US Marketplace currently offers unlimited music downloads for US$15 per month. Under this system you rent the songs, losing the song licenses if you stop paying. This sounds excellent but is fairly academic as Australians can’t make purchases from the American Zune store. However, you can get a monthly service for Internet browser streaming of the entire music library from the Australian NineMSN site for $12.99. Will we see this for the Australian Zune release? Only time will tell.

The delay in the Australian iTunes store was widely attributed to the difficulty in reaching digital distribution agreements with record labels. Such agreements are fiercely local and depend on key individuals in each region -- no single agreement would be suitable for a worldwide audience. As such, we’d expect Zune to be integrated with NineMSN’s music service when it launches here. Then again, we’d expect Microsoft’s “Plays for Sure” to unquestionably play on a Microsoft player. We were wrong.

Lonely Wi-Fi
A key element of the Zune’s sales pitch is the wireless sharing of tracks, which can be played three times over three days, after which they are deleted. However, an echo of the file with its exact name as a reference for the online store is preserved, so that you can buy that exact item later. One of the major problems with this strategy is that right now nobody else will have a Zune to share with. So your “Wi-Fi” community options are of course severely limited at this stage.

The whole imported Zune shopping experience is quite disheartening, especially in contrast with the rather mature Australian NineMSN music site and service, which offers a huge selection of tracks and music videos for download and purchase. Zune does look like a promising player, but at this stage we would advise waiting for the release of the Australian Zune marketplace.

It is important to note that this is not a review per se, because when the Zune does hit the shelves, there will be a localised music Marketplace, along with revised song pricing and official support. Until then, remember that we are looking at an American import, and there may be differences between the Zune that we’ve taken a look at and the final Australian version. These differences may affect our opinion of the localised unit.