First Impressions
Setup worked well, loading it up I was met with a simple choice between default settings and custom. There followed 30 seconds of informing it where my media files were(Music, Movies, Pictures). It then got crunching and parsing the data. This can take a while because it's apparently performance intensive.
Overall, loading is a snap, equivalent loading time to WMP10. Pretty comfortable for me, it's not Foobar, but not much is while loading a UI.
User Interface
The user interface in the Zune player is split up into four main tabs, Collection, Device, Marketplace, Social. Obviously, I don't buy music online, don't have a Zune and I'm an anti-social bastard, so I'll focus on collection.
Collection is where you play music from and where your entire media library is held. Split up pretty logically into Music, Play lists, Videos, Pictures, Pod casts. Snapping between those is pretty quick, despite the large amount of pre-fetching Zune does.
Music tab, where most people will spend most of their time, is pretty understandable. Three main parts, an Artist list, an Album list and a Song List. You can easily switch to a more traditional list, but frankly, the default display gets the job done.
Play lists is where the player begins to have some difficulties, theres no smart play lists. This won't affect people like me who just search by Album and stick it into a list, but some people mind it. Something to keep in mind.
Videos are alot simpler, a simple thumbnail preview of all the videos in your media library.
Pictures, pictures are organised by folders and the most you can do with them is slide shows. MS didn't intend for Zune to be a manager for your pictures, you are supposed to use Windows Live Galleries for that but as a simple slide show display it works. Wouldn't actually recommend this.
Playing media
On the whole, the Zune player works. Which is to say, it doesn't crash playing music or videos. Quite a difference from the prior version.
Playing music leads you to a great ripoff of CoverFlow, a slightly transparent play list and controls cover up a background full of your album covers(if you have any) with the album cover of what you are currently playing enlarged.
Playing videos turns the Zune a semi full screen video player. The video size is variable, like in every other player, the controls fade out as required. However, a quirk appears here. Clicking 'exit' from the video(rather then exiting the entire player) does not actually turn off the video from playing. You have to pause it then leave. Even then it doesn't shut it off until you load something else.
Not the best functionality there.
Other quirks and odd edds
Most of the stuff comes down to not being able to properly shut down videos and music from playing, you can only pause it and switch to something else if you want to replace it.
Other quirks are the UI not being perfectly understandable, with some icons, such as the button to go from the player back to the browser not being clear, and play list creation being kinda awkward.
The other major problem is RAM usage. Not even playing anything it can easily hit 100MB, which passes iTunes by a not insignificent margin. Whether thats a problem is user dependent.
