I got the chance to play with a friend's Zune HD for a while... and so I naturally snagged the opportunity to give the thing a go. I won't lie, I'm still having trouble grasping exactly what the thing is... I mean, I'd used touchscreen MP3 players before the iTouch and never really liked them. The iTouch was the first that I liked, but even then there was a bit of a learning curve. But with the Zune HD, the entire experience has been something else entirely.
My first reaction to the device was something along the lines of, "Dang... can they possibly make this thing any lighter?" Seriously, when someone tells you that the Zune HD is light because of it's aluminum chassis, believe them. This thing is light like an iPod Nano, not very wide like an iPod Nano (current generation, of course), and thin like an iPod Nano. Next to my iPod Touch, it feels inferior, as it's smaller and lighter. (To give you an idea, my iPod Touch feels like it's a slab of glass or basically just very dense. The Zune HD feels disconcertingly hollow and yet also very strong.)
Once powered on, I was a bit confused. The interface is simple enough, and I would go so far as to say it's more simple than an iTouch, the only exception being that the Zune is limited to media playback (there are some apps...) for the most part. The display comes right up to the borders of the unit, and reminds me of my first impression of the original iTouch when it first came out: "...there's no way this is real." Only difference being that I believe the Zune HD is real, so it's not really a shocker.
The display itself is quite vivid... I feel like the demo video was created specifically with extra vivid colors to try and help up-sell the unit. It's a bit corny, but hey, it works. Without getting into details, web browsing could use a lot of help. It's a lot better than Windows Mobile from what I remember (although a lot of the feel is the same), and at first I thought it was displaying things wrong when I noticed that no, the edge of the AMOLED is actually that close to the end of the actual device and the lack of a status bar at the top had caught me by surprise. I hope Microsoft has a firmware in the works that will get this thing an iPod Touch-worthy web browser... or better yet, a Nokia S60 one..
That all said, I've barely held this thing in my hand for 30 minutes. Time to dig deeper!