FAIL. I'm saying that as someone who has owned a Zune 30, a Zune 8, and a Zune HD, and who hasn't owned an Apple product since 1994 before buying my 4th gen 64 GB Touch.
The sad fact is that the only device that even came close to surpassing the Zune HD was the previous gen Nano. That is the only iPod that truly was worthy of the praise it received. I've said it before - the Touch is for people who want to play games, not listen to music, which is an "Oh by the way" feature on it.
Myth. Neither the Zune software nor the Zune HD even do gapless reliably. I was fully expecting to be disappointed by the sound quality of the Touch. I was not.
Gapless is a feature used by selective few. When I say it's better at music, I'm talking about the experience.
If I'm listening to an artist whose songs I own, I'm presented with a list of other albums from that artist, including ones I may never have heard of. I can buy them right from the device. The Touch does not do that. That feature is how you sell music. Why iTunes is incapable of such a simple, yet effective feature is beyond me. Half of my library came from that methodology.
On the Touch I have to crank the volume to just below max to get any usable sound. On the Zune HD I'm going deaf on the halfway mark.
The Zune HD presents music in genres for easy playback. The Touch does not. It lists them that way but does not allow me to create my own "radio" from a genre.
The music EXPERIENCE is superior.
I don't know where you get the "half the clicks" bit from.
TO play a genre on the Zune HD, I go Music --> then hit the little play button next to the genre I want. It automatically plays the music in the genre in random order.
To do the same on the Touch I go Music --> ....wait, I have to back out of the last song that was playing. OK, then I go to More --> Genres --> Pick the Genre --> ...uh oh, it wants me to play an artist. I can't just tell it to play all of the music in the genre in random order. I could use Genius Playlist but that requires iTunes - meaning I have to be near a computer. I could go to Top 25, but that's only 25 songs - maybe 2 hours worth of music.
In other words, it's WAY too many clicks to perform a basic function. It wants me to create a playlist in advance and shuffle it. I could create such playlists, but what if the music changes? That's a pain to keep going back updating the playlist over and over again when I add or remove music from the Touch. Versus the Zune HD which "just works".
The Zune Pass is the only reason for the Zune to exist, and it sucks. Many albums aren't available, and there is an almost ubiquitous policy that songs >= 10 minutes long are "Album Only", preventing them from being downloaded without purchasing the whole album. You can't even use the 10 free song credits you are allotted each month for this. In addition, most albums contain more than 10 songs, so to use your credits on the albums where it's possible to do so, you have to download them over two or more months. It ain't worth the trouble.
I don't use Zune Pass. The Zune Marketplace - the interface - is superior to iTunes. That's all I'm saying. Zune Marketplace lets you manage your device a lot more cleanly than iTunes does. iTunes wants you to lock your device to that one computer or face having all your content deleted. Zune Marketplace doesn't care. I can freely move whatever files on or off the device as I see fit. Apple treats you like a criminal. Microsoft says "it's yours to do with as you wish."
I'm not even going to talk about how glacially slow the Zune software is with large collections.
Do you know why Zune is "slow" on collections? Because you left on the option for it to reorganize your files for you. If you tell it to just scan and track the files wherever they may be and not move them or copy them, it's no slower than iTunes under the same conditions. Again, Zune will allow me to move files to and from the device as I see fit. iTunes wants to sync everything and only on one computer, and treat you like a criminal for it. Tap the same Touch into two different computers and see what happens by default. Tap the same Zune HD into two different computers and watch it happily bring the music in - like a good music player should.
