Hey, this looks like a great deal from CompUSA in Spokane: Buy a Microsoft Zune and you get a free $15 iTunes gift card. Wait a minute. iTunes? Zune? What's wrong with this picture? Note to CompUSA Corporate: iTunes songs won't play on a Zune.
However, you could download those songs from iTunes, burn them to a CD, then rip them. Finally, you could play them on the Zune. But that would be illegal. – Charlie White
CompUSA knows how to sell Zunes! (LOL) [MacRumors Forums] (Thanks, JC!)

At around 10 AM (PST), the official Zune site had a little update on it. The update now gives you the ability to manage your account from the web and no need to sign into the client software (Zune MarketPlace) The management will allow you to: Update, change, or cancel your Zune Pass subscription Buy Points Change the password [...]

Valentine’s day is coming up and on Zune.net they are offering up some themed goodies, sch as new backgrounds for your Zune, some songs and other various things to celebrate the day. So if want to show your Zune some love or significant other then Zune.net has some things for you.    [...]

  Earlier we reported that a Global Sky, a Philippine-based call centre issued a press release regarding a new Wi-Fi phone from Microsoft. Apparantely this is NOT a Zune Phone, but instead a service called ‘One Follow Me’.   The press release fails to note the name of the service, but if you visit the One [...]

So I tried the service today. It's really quite good. Here is a snippit of a mail I sent internally today regarding my experience:

I purchased a movie today to test the service. While the web-based interface was a bit lacking, the download manager was very good. For one price, it delivered a portable copy for my (non-zune) device and a larger file that streams to my 360.... The selection was very good, with movies and shows from the 6 major studios. The pricing was good ($9.99 for second run and $14.99 for first run). Encoding was very good... File size was relatively small. The download for both files took less than a half an hour... All in all a very good experience.

The one thing I did not try was migrating from one system to another. I did burn a CD from WMP. Unlike with audio CDs, the files remain DRMed. That means I'd have to have a way to authorize on two different machines. I'm going to give that a shot tonight.

Even though the Zune Phone is all but confirmed (there haven't been any formal announcements yet), we shouldn't be jumping to conclusions every time there's an announcement that somehow ties Microsoft to phones. Case in point, this morning Global Sky, a Philippine-based call center, issued a press release saying they were going to support Wi-Fi enabled Phones from Microsoft. Several sites jumped to the conclusion that this was, in fact, the Zune phone. However, it's actually something different.
We inquired with Global Sky and they said their support is actually for the "One Follow Me" service from Microsoft that lets overseas workers communicate cheaply with their families back home. Microsoft themselves also said there have been no formal announcements about anything to do with Zune phones.
Rumor smashed. – Jason Chen
One Follow Me

Our favorite Windows on Mac virtualization software just got a second Release Candidate, adding loads of pretty awesome features make your Windows actually run like Windows.
Among them are full USB 2.0 support, which means you can use your Zune on your Mac with abandon, iSight support, so you can video-chat it up in XP, improved memory usage, sharing a Boot Camp partition, and better Coherence support.
That last part means you can actually add Windows apps to your dock, and if Parallels isn't running when you launch the app, it'll start up automagically for you. – Jason Chen
Product Page [Parallels]

Now that we're pretty sure the Zune Phone is coming, what do we want to see in it? Well, even though Microsoft's been leaving a lot of features out of first-generation products—especially when compared to Apple's feature-rich phone—here's a list of stuff that we think the Zune Phone needs to have to beat the iPhone.
• Touchscreen: This probably isn't going to happen, but if you're going to compete with the iPhone's fancy multi-touch system, you're going to need to come up with something similar. It's either that or have a phone with loads of buttons.
• MP3 Ringtones: You can do this on current Windows Mobile phones, but you can't do this on the iPhone. Why? Because the ringtone and music industry don't want to give up another source of revenue. Being able to use songs you downloaded off of Zune's marketplace as ringtones would be great.
• Wi-Fi syncing and downloading: Let's use the Zune's Wi-Fi to grab songs on the go and to sync u...

When sex/tech blogger and educator Violet Blue was listed on the Forbes list of web celebs, she didn't expect to be publicly shit-talked by another finalist, who dismissed her as "some porn person."
That person was Leo Laporte, known for his polarized and biting rants on everything from Zune to Gizmodo amidst iPhone rumors. The comment was mentioned in the only tech podcast with a combined clubhouse age of over 150-years, TWiT. That's "This Week in Tech", the irreverent podcast where Laporte pretends he's Napoleon.
Violet, of course, isn't just a sex blogger. She's been written about in the WSJ, has authored Wired articles, and is columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle. Yesterday, she used her superior mainstream press ammo to address TWiT on SFgate.com, where she defended herself aptly. Her column was relatively politically correct, per the publication's standards. The real counter -- and threat -- comes from her uncensored personal blog, even if she doesn't reco...

Turns out Microsoft ended up not going a head with previous laid out planes of having an add for the Super Bowl 2007 game that took place on Sunday. A previous report hinted to the fact that Microsoft were looking at advertising the Zune at the Super Bowl, but oh well there were [...]