Dokusei Design

Sooo.. I got a new cell­phone. It was slightly invol­un­tary, because my mom bought it for me after the renewal of my con­tract with Fido. With the Fido dol­lars that we had, I got this phone for free (woohoo!). How­ever, I do still really like my Nokia because it’s so customizable.

Over­all rat­ing:

SO.. I have the Microsoft 8 giga­byte Zune Mp3 player. I’ve never done an elec­tronic device review before, so here goes noth­ing. :P

Phys­i­cal Char­ac­ter­is­tics The “Look” In the pic­ture above, the mp3 looks kinda glossy in the screen, but in real­ity I don’t find it that shiny, but the whole thing in gen­eral is matte. The back cover of the mp3 is a matte metal­lic mate­r­ial (sorry I don’t know what — but yeah). Noth­ing has been scratched or dented so far! :)

Dimen­sions 4.1cm x 9.1cm x 7mm

But­tons The but­tons are sim­ple and easy to use — Left side is the ‘back’ but­ton, and the right side is the ‘play/pause’ but­ton. It’s actu­ally quite use­ful to have a play but­ton that is sep­a­rate from the actual screen — so you don’t have to actu­ally nav­i­gate to play a song, but of course you can just press enter on the touch pad. The touch pad has a slightly rough feel­ing to it, despite how the image looks like. In my opin­ion, I find it quite hard to use because it goes so fast some­times. Other than that.. I don’t find any­thing wrong.

Screen I have com­pared the bright­ness of the screen with my ipod touch, my brother’s cowon mp3 player, and my cell­phone. Although it was set to the max bright­ness — the Zune came in last when bright­ness was com­pared. You don’t really notice it when you’re using it alone, but when you put it beside other screens, it’s def­i­nitely evi­dent that it just isn’t as bright.

Nav­i­ga­tion Like I said above, nav­i­ga­tion is a lit­tle dif­fi­cult with the scroll pad.. some­times too fast, and inac­cu­rate. I always end up select­ing some­thing I didn’t want to select because once my fin­ger touches the touch pad, it goes some­where else!

Instal­la­tion & pro­gram I almost ripped all my hair out try­ing to install the pro­gram and fig­ure out HOW the pro­gram works. It’s defi­natly not clear… and not user friendly at all! It took me for­ever to fig­ure out how to send over my music, and when I did fig­ure it out, I couldn’t select the songs I wanted through­out the com­puter. I had to send in w/e was in that spe­cific folder I directed it to. This draw back also occurs with the itunes pro­gram with pho­tos =\. What I do like is the design. It’s really pretty — pink haha.

Pack­ag­ing I hate to com­pare it to the ipod touch pack­ag­ing, but the Zune’s pack­ag­ing took me 20 min­utes to open every­thing, whereas the ipod took me 5 min­utes. More­over, the Zune’s pack­ag­ing had the plas­tic box where you have to ran­gle with the sealed plas­tic.. which hurt! I guess they really like to pack it in.

Gen­eral usage This is a good mp3 for gen­eral use. I don’t think non-music lovers would really care whether the screen’s bright enough. The Zune plays music per­fectly fine.