Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Whether or not you think the Zune is a fairly ho-hum media device, the one thing that's pretty agreeable is that its relatively subtle "doubleshot" casing -- where the edges have a translucent or different color than the rest of the plastics -- is unique, and the closest thing to an iconic aesthetic the Zune has right now. Potentially unfortunately for Microsoft, three days ago Apple was granted patent 20070048470, for "Housing of an electronic device formed by doubleshot injection molding". Filed August 16, 2005 by, among others, Johnny "iPhone" Ive himself, the process details a multiwall plastic-injected enclosure which, among other things, can be useful for for "forming internal features on the inside surfaces" -- like, say, alternate edge colors in the Zune, or the white and black-yet-clear plastics as seen in MacBooks and iMacs and iPods. So, in addition to that per-Zune tariff Microsoft pays to Universal, is Apple about to ...

A new site which I came across a few days called ZuneMods.com has done a really nice list of tips Zune users on how they take their Zune battery life that extra mile. Tip 1 Complete Power Down When many people are done listening to their Zune they hold the play button thinking they are turning their device [...]

Apparently a Zune promotion last Sunday night got a little out of hand.
The Zunemobile, a tricked-out Toyota FJ, was brought to a New York neighborhood with lots of nightlife and kept the party going, beaming its beats into the wee hours from the phalanx of huge speakers in the back.
It turns out some of the neighbors on Ludlow Street didn't welcome the social at 3 a.m., especially not the Justin Timberlake tunes, and filed a noise complaint.
They also videotaped the event and created a Web page -- wakeupmicrosoft.com -- to post their complaint and demand restitution from:
Ideally, if following the old adage of "eye for an eye," we would like to (legally) blast music throughout Microsoft's HQ during a week day. Preferably right before a large product release, when employee stress levels are at their highest. Alternatively and/or additionally, lump sum payments to all residents disturbed by this incident would be tolerated. Instead they received an apology fro...

Despite semi-denials from Microsoft about the existence of the ZunePhone, we still have it on good word that the phone will be launched some time this year. And if you take all the patents Microsoft's filed lately and look at them through a ZunePhone lens, you'll see that there's even more evidence to prove that it's coming.
Among the patents that Mad4Mobiles found are speech enhancement/filtering, an on-screen keyboard (like the iPhone!), capacitance touch slider (like the iPhone!), contact display, health monitoring (wha?), clamshell form factor (hrk!), and remote control of playback on a remote device. All these point to various features the ZunePhone could have, but may not make it to the first version. – Jason Chen
12 Patents that define the Zune Phone [Mad4MobilePhones]

Filed under: Portable Video
The Zune has already seen its fair share of hacks in its relatively short lifetime, from running Linux to supporting USB drives, but it seems that there's still plenty of room for improvement, the latest addition being a small but significant tweak that forces the device to play nice with your DivX files. Whipped up by a member of the Zune Scene forums, the hack simply consists of a modification to the Windows registry that allows DivX files to be dragged and dropped into the Zune software. Then, the next time you sync the device, the files are automatically transcoded into the more Zune-friendly WMV format, ready to be viewed at your leisure. The hack also apparently supports Xvid files, albeit with less than optimal results. Not exactly the solution that native DivX support on the player would be, but if you've got a pile of DivX file and nothing else to play 'em on, it looks like it's about the best you're gonna get for the foreseeable future. As alwa...