In my previous blog entry I was discussing three things I didn’t like about my Zune. Let me now go to the next one, namely the wireless portion.
When I purchased my Zune, that was THE feature I was looking for. I thought that connecting my player to retrieve my podcast was a thing of the past. I think that I was clearly mistaken.
First, as an aside, you need to connect your Zune to recharge it. Clearly, the likelihood of a doing at the same time is greatly increased, especially if it’s your laptop you are connecting to.
But besides that, I encountered a few problems. Wireless syncing is really configured by doing a triple pairing: you zune, one computer and one wireless setting. My laptop moves around. I am not always connected to the same wireless network. To make things worse, the wireless connection at my university was not supported because of the authentication model used there (web page or WPA2 with domain authentication). So wireless syncing at my university was not an option. At home, it would not always work. Often my computer was not detected. And when it did work, speed was horrible. While wireless syncing might work for small deltas, if the goal is to receive 100 meg of podcast, even over 802.11g, it takes a LONG time. Much longer than say looking for my USB cable, hooking up my Zune and syncing. And connecting my USB cable was more likely to work. So for all there reason, I ended up not using that feature.
I think if Microsoft wants the wireless to really work, they should allow you to sync to your library through the internet. This would be similar to the kind of technology Orb supports. Your files are accessible through the web (even though they are stored at home). And you can access them from anywhere. This would make wireless syncing useful.
(and on a side note, if you have never tried Orb, you should do it now! It allows you to see your music, video and picture media from just about everywhere)
Stay tuned for part 3 of this Zune series