After being warmly received by the guys at C|Net, The iRiver S10 digital audio player just got another adoring review, and this one is an more-extensive look with video and beaucoups pics. The reviewer liked just about everything about the tiny player except its relatively high price, $194 for the 2GB model and an extra $30 more to import the thing. He makes some good points, such as....
Personally, I think the player is well worth the extra cost. The S10 is a delectable little DAP that does so much so well. It's remarkable in sound quality, size, customization, and extra features; it's easy and comfortable to use; and my god it's lovely to look at. Longer battery life and increased storage capacity would be welcomed improvements, sure, but both are becoming such standard complaints that I don't consider them to be deal breakers.Why aren't these tiny players readily available in the United States, easily taking on the more-clunky competition? – Charlie White Revie...

Up until now, Mac OS X and Linux users had been left out of the social—that is to say they haven't been able to use the Microsoft Zune with their operating system. "Until now" because the library libmtp is actually able to read the Zune's crazy filesystem on other, non-Microsoft OSes. How big a deal is this?

Right now, it isn't that huge a deal. The programs making use of the library (like XNJB for Mac OS X which is pictured here and amaroK for Linux) still only offer rudimentary support for the Zune. The only thing you can do is read the files on the player and transferring files to and from the Zune is still a ways away.
However, a fully-functioning Zune for Mac OS X and/or Linux might get people to take a closer look at the Zune rather than automatically discounting it. Of course, you'd first have to be convinced that the Zune is worth going out of your way to configure esoteric libraries just to get it to work on your OS of choice. (Try saying the Zune is...

Microsoft's efforts to loosen up access to closely held music owned by record labels has an unintended consequence: It punishes artists who want to share. Commentary by Eliot Van Buskirk.

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
Gather round, 'cause we've got some Zune hacks to get your Sunday going. First, a fellow named Kristof has informed Zune-Online about a way to get the Zune software running on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (there's also a Vista hack too, which we saw earlier). The site has exact step-by-step instructions on how to pull off this one, but the short of it is, it essentially involves editing the Zune.inf file. For our next trick, we'll point you to a site that shows you how to change the Zune icon as seen in Windows. For that one, you'll need to first pull off the USB drive hack that we showed you before, and then you'll need to use Regedt (Registry Edit) to find the appropriate registry value, an ICO editing program (like IcoFX), and patience when drawing on an icon that's 48 x 48 pixels. But you'll have our eternal love and respect if you change your Zune icon to the Engadget "e" logo. As usual when trying something like this...

Apparently Jason Chen doesn't write for the Chicago Sun-Times. Their tech writer Andy Ihnatko ripped the player a new one last week (maybe just upset that he was the last person in history to review the Zune).
Still, he had some nice quotables that attack the music industry in a tone you usually reserved for seedy tech repositories like Gizmodo.

The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, "Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?" You'll find that the Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World, where users aren't allowed to do anything that isn't in the industry's direct interests.
Microsoft's colossal blunder was to knock the user out of that question and put the music industry in its place.
The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.So did he like it? – Mark Wilson
Zune Review [suntimes]...

Filed under: Gaming, Portable Audio, Portable Video
Cookie cutter gadget? Passe. It's all about skins, even the kind that may or may not ruin the shiny new finish on your valued consumer electronics. Submitted for your approval: tons of skins for your rare and lustworthy devices. Ok, so the 360 isn't much of a skin, but we find the literal use of the term rather amusing, and when was the last time you saw a fake-fur faceplate?

P.S. -Big ups on the Xbox 360 and Eames-inspired PS3 and Wii skins above.

[Via Joystiq, thanks Craig]

Read - PS3 skins
Read - Wii skins
Read - Zune skins
Read - PSP, Xbox, etc. "skins" 
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Feed Your Zune is a a new application from the guys at FireAnt.tv that allows you to subscribe to your favourite video podcasts and get them downloaded and synced with your Zune with ease. The application comes with a bunch of already added video feeds such as my 2 favourite: Diggnation and Ask a Ninja, [...]

A good chance you would have already heard about the Zune hard drive hack and the Wifi one, but since we were offline, we did not have a chance to post about it, so now we are :) So what the deal is with this hack is you are able to move documents to and from [...]

The Brits finally move to let people use personal FM transmitters such as the Griffin iTrip to connect their iPods to car stereos. Plus: Zune Hack: Trade Any File, Quick In Listening Post.

We knew it would be done sooner or later, and with the mod to use your Zune as a portable hard drive, DRM cracking finally here.
First, you need to enable hard drive mode using the instructions we posted before. Then, rename whatever files—MP3s, movies, programs—to have the extension ".jpg" in order to fool the Zune into thinking its an image. This hack works because Zune doesn't apply DRM to images!
Then what?
Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the "containing folder" where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension.
We tried doing this before with just the Zune software, without the storage hack, and Zune threw an error because it resizes the images down in order to conserve space, and our file wasn't a real image. ...