The Zune HD is a pretty awesome piece of hardware, and the portable media player has an attractive user interface to boot. But when I recently reviewed the Zune HD, two of my biggest complaints were software-related. First, for the most part, what you see is what you get. There are very few apps available for the Zune HD, while there are literally a hundred thousand that can run on the iPod Touch, which will probably make a lot of people overlook the fact that the iPod Touch can’t play 720p HD video the way the Zune HD can.

Second, the Zune HD has limited codec support, which kills me since most of my video collection is in DivX or Xvid, and neither of those formats are supported. Now it looks like Microsoft is preparing to roll out an update to allow support for more MPEG-4 based codecs including Xvid, although not DivX.

The new software will also bring Smart DJ playlists to the Zune HD. Right now you can only use this feature on the Zune desktop software. It should help the Zune HD compete feature-for-feature with the iPod Touch. You know, except for the app support, although a Facebook app is reportedly in the works.

via SlashGear

Microsoft’s Zune HD is a touchscreen portable media player that has a number of things going for it. It’s thin, light, and has a brilliant OLED display. It can play 720p WMV and H.264 videos, which means you may be able to copy movies from your collection without transcoding them first. But the device doesn’t actually have an HD display. Instead, it has a 480 x 272 pixel widescreen display that’s actually smaller than the iPod Touch screen, which may come as a surprise to anyone that assumes a devices with HD in its name would actually display HD video.

The Zune HD is also one of the first consumer electronics devices to use the new NVIDIA Tegra platform, which bundles an ARM-based processor with NVIDIA graphics. This is how the low-power media player can play high bitrate HD video flawlessly. The Tegra processor also enables 3D graphics effects which show up in menu animations and in some of the handful of applications currently available for the Zune HD.

The folks at NVIDIA sent me a Zune HD to review for a few weeks. I recently took it on vacation to put it through the paces. The model featured in this review has 16GB of storage. A 32GB version is also available. You can find the complete review at mobiputing.

Some of you may have noticed I’ve been a bit quieter than usual over the past two weeks. That’s because I was visiting family in New Zealand.

In case you were wondering, traveling from Philadelphia to New Zealand takes an awfully long time — about 25-30 hours one way. But thanks to a good book or three and some personal tech, the flights were actually relatively pleasant. And thanks to a light weight mini-laptop that I threw in my bag, I was able to keep up on the latest news and lend Lee a hand in keeping Liliputing up to date from the road while still enjoying the first real vacation I’ve had in about two years.

I’m back at home now, but I figured I’d give you a little peek into my travel bag. Here’s what I took with me for pleasure and business purposes.

Asus UL20A

I decided to pick up this 12.1 inch laptop with a dual core Intel SU7300 processor after testing out a review unit a few weeks ago. The notebook strikes a pretty good balance between price, power and battery life, while offering more screen resolution, processing power, and graphics capabilities than you’ll find in most Intel Atom powered netbooks. While I wish the UL20A got better battery life, I’ve found that with the energy saving features turned on, this laptop can run for up to 6 hours, which is slightly better than my aging Asus Eee PC 1000H. I left that 10 inch netbook at home and took the UL20A with me for working on the road and I was quite pleased with its performance.

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Been entering the Liliputing contests for the past two weeks and still haven’t won anything yet? Don’t worry we’ve got one more big prize to giveaway: a slightly used Zune HD portable media player.

NVIDIA sent me this Zune HD to review recently so I could check out the first consumer electronics device to use the NVIDIA Tegra processor. Tegra combines a low power ARM-based CPU with high performance NVDIA graphics capabilities. The end result is a portable media player that can run for 8 hours on a while watching video or more than 30 hours while listening to music. But it also has the oomph to handle 720p H.264 and WMV video playback.

Unfortunately the Zune’s 480 x 272 pixel display can’t actually show all the graphic detail available in those 720p videos. But being able to copy your media collection to a portable device without first transcoding your videos and changing the display resolutions is pretty awesome.

The Zune HD can also play some pretty stunning looking video games, although I really wish there were more apps available in the Zune Marketplace. The hardware definitely could definitely give the iPod Touch a run for its money. But without better support for 3rd party apps, it might be tough to make a case for purchasing this $219 media player over an iPod Touch.

Fortunately you don’t have to worry about that, because I’m giving one away for free. The Zune HD that’s up for grabs is the same one I’ve been testing for the past few weeks. It has the NVIDIA logo laser-etched on the back, and it’s served me well on two 13 hour plane rides.

This contest is open to readers across the globe, although some features of the Zune software such as the Zune Pass subscription media service, are only available in the US. Make sure to read the official contest rules before entering.

The contest will end at 12:01AM Eastern on Wednesday, December 9th.

I’ve been using the Zune HD that NVIDIA sent me for the last few days, and I’ve come to a few conclusions so far:

• From a hardware standpoint, this thing is (mostly) awesome. It gets excellent battery life with good audio quality and the ability to handle HD video
• The screen is too small. Sure, 16:9 videos look pretty good, but because the display has a 16:9 aspect ratio, if you try watching a 4:3 video you get black bars on the sides making the movie look postage stamp-sized.
• The fact that you can play 720p videos without downsampling them is nice, but it would be even nicer if the screen could actually show all of those pixels. DiVX support would also be nice.
• The user interface is pretty slick, but you’re pretty much stuck with the default apps because there are very, very few software downloads available in the Zune Marketplace.

Microsoft took a small step toward remedying that last point this week. First, the company rolled out new firmware for the Zune HD. The Zune 4.3 firmware lets the on-screen keyboard stretch from one end of the screen to the other in landscape mode, and adds an auto-suggest feature for text input. But the coolest thing is that it adds support for 3D games, and today Microsft added 6 new applications to the Zune Marketplace including a couple of pretty impressive 3D games such as PGR: Ferrari Edition and Vans sk8: Pol Service.

I wrote a bit more about the new games at Download Squad, where you can check out a video demo of some of the new games. The 3D graphics acceleration is something that really makes the Zune HD shine. I just wish there were more applications available. On the bright side, all of the apps that are currently available for download are free. So there’s that.

I’m still interested in seeing how the NVIDIA Tegra platform that powers the Zune would perform in a smartbook or netbook-style device with an operating system like Linux or Windows CE that’s more open to third party development.

I’ve had a bit more time to play with that Zune HD that I unboxed yesterday, and I think I’m going to have a love/mild annoyance relationship with this media player going forward. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far after using the Zune HD for about a day:

Pros:

• The user interface is incredibly slick and the animations are attractive without being particularly distracting.
• The desktop Zune Marketplace software is excellent for arranging media, downloading podcasts, and purchasing media for download. I might keep using it even if I don’t decide to stick with the Zune HD as a portable media player.
• The multitouch OLED display is bright, sharp, and vivid.
• I like the way Zune Marketplace features are integrated with the user interface so that, for example, you can find related artists to the musician you’re listening to, and download photos and biographic information on the fly over a WiFi connection.

Cons:

• There are only three hardware buttons: Power, Media, and Home. None of these buttons will let you do things like pause, fast forward, or skip tracks without looking at the screen, because all of the playback controls require the touchscreen.
• There’s no support for DiVX, or MPEG-2 or a number of other formats, for that matter. The Zune HD only supports WMV, H.264, and MP4/M4V files.
• While the user interface is sleek, it’s not particularly customizable. I’ve been using a Windows Mobile PDA as a music player (among other things) for years, and while WinMo gets a lot of flak, the fact that you can choose your own media players is kind of awesome.

And while it’s awesome that the Zune HD lets you transfer your 720p videos to the device without transcoding them, the fact that it has a 3.3 inch, 480 x 272 pixel display that can’t actually display HD resolutions is a bit ironic. Since the model I’m using has only 16GB of storage space, and since my video collection is in DiVX, I’m tempted to just transcode a bunch of my 720p video files to QVGA H.264 files to save space and cram more media onto the Zune HD, which kind of defeats the purpose of having an HD-capable portable media player.

That said, if your media collection is already in the correct format and if you don’t crave hardware buttons or the ability to tinker further with the user interface, the Zune HD still packs an awful lot of wow factor. And once your media is on the device, the Zune HD really does a nice job of playback. I’m still hopeful that the App section of the Zune Marketplace will open up to include third party apps though. Right now, there are only a handful of apps including a calculator, weather forecast application and a few games.

You can check out my video overview of the Zune HD user interface after the break. It’s a little blurry because it turns out it’s kind of hard to shoot this kind of video with my digital camera. But it should give you a general idea of what the user experience is like.

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The NVIDIA Tegra platform combines a low power ARM processor with high performance NVIDIA graphics to enable HD video playback on low power devices with excellent battery life. We’re still waiting for the first NVIDIA Tegra powered netbooks or smartbooks to hit the market. But there is one device that’s already available that uses the Tegra chipset: The Zune HD media player.

The folks at NVIDIA sent me a 16GB Zune HD to play with. I’m just starting to explore the Zune hardware and software, but while I’m setting it up to synchronize with my PC, I thought I’d share my unboxing and first impressions videos. You can check them out after the break.

This particular model has the NVIDIA logo etched onto the back. I forgot to highlight that in the video, which is why I took the photo you can see above.

I’m pretty impressed with the slim size, light weight, attractive UI, and super-crips display. The real test will be how well it handles HD video playback and what kind of battery life it gets. But I’m already finding myself wishing that the Zune HD had calendar and contact applications and the ability to sync with Microsoft Outlook. If it could do those things, I might be willing to toss aside my 6 year old Dell Axim X50v PDA and upgrade to a smaller, thinner device. I don’t really want to pay $50 or more per month to get a smartphone, and nobody really makes standalone PDAs anymore. (Update: Thanks to obo for pointing out that HP does still have a few iPAQ models that aren’t smartphones).

I suppose I could always get an iPod Touch if Microsoft doesn’t expand the app marketplace for the Zune HD, but the HD video playback capabilities on this little media player make it pretty compelling.

On the down side, I just ran into my first snag: The Zune HD can’t handle DiVX files. I have dozens of videos on my computer that I’ve recorded using a TV tuner and compressed to DiVX to save space. The Zune software won’t recognize them, and if I want to get them onto the media player I’m going to have to convert them to WMV, H.264, or another recognized format.

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