One of the most clever videos I've seen in awhile. Check it out here.

So it's official. 1.3 is coming out tomorrow. All you doubters (you know who you are) can rest easy that it won't be weeks or days. :)

I happened to be reading the Seattle Times this morning (well, looking at the ads, anyway) and noticed several stores had Zune on ad. Best Buy was selling it for $229 and also advertising DLO accessories. Fred Meyer was advertising 15% of all accessories. I even saw it at Office Max with a $50 instant rebate making it $199. that offer is even available online. There are some great deals to be had!

It's been a looonnnnngggggg time since I uploaded some new photos to my Flickr account (actually I was thinking of migrating to Zoomr, but that's another story). I finally got sick and tired of looking at the same of pics in my Flickr badge to the right and I broke down and uploaded some new ones. You can view them here. Enjoy!

I spent some time this week looking at the news related to the 1.3 update. I was a bit surprised at some of the negativity in the coverage. I get that there is some frustration that we didn't get it out on the exact day we said we would. Heck, I'd be disappointed too. Maybe we shouldn't have set an expectation in the first place. But, it isn't like we're not going to ship it.

Here's what I can tell you. We are going to ship it. I have been personally testing it. I think users will be happy with the results. I'm happy with the results. I think it will be worth the extra few days of waiting to ship a solid release. So now that I've opened that Pandora's box, feel free to flame me.

I happened to be at the Apple store in Bellevue Square and I got to take Apple TV for a spin. Before I share my thoughts, a few caveats. First, I'm commenting as a consumer. I don't consider the Apple TV competitive with what I do for a living, but just in case, these are purely my opinions not those of MS. Second, there was a time in my career where I did work on similar (some would argue exactly the same) technology. So, my critiques will be biased by that previous experience. With that out of the way....

Initial impression: I was surprised at how small the unit was (and how much it resembled the mini). I still don't understand why Apple doesn't make it look more like a traditional piece of AV equipment in both shape and color. Frankly, it would stick out in my media rack and I think it is a bit distracting. The other thing I noticed right away was how hot it ran. There is no way I could put is in my rack without overheating the components. I already have that problem with my 360, I don't need to compound it.

I thought the UI was very nice. It was clean, simple and elegant. Looking at the images and how fast they render, I'm guessing that everything is cached locally for display. That is something extender doesn't do (or doesn't do well). So long as they don't add too many options, the UI should remain pretty straightforward (if limited). I was disappointed in the capacity of the drive. 40G is smaller than my iPod. I don't think it would be very useful. I didn't ask, but I'd want to make sure it hooked up to my PC. They said it connects to iTunes and since iTunes runs on my PC, I'd expect it to be both PC and Mac compatible, but I wasn't able to check. I'd love to see the set-up for a PC network. That has always been the bug-a-boo of streaming content to devices.

The thing that really turned me off was the quality of the video. I was surprised at how poor the images were. They are pixelated and there were tons of artifacts. I played with several of the menus just to make sure I wasn't getting a poor feed (Podcasts, TV shows, etc). All were consistently bad. My wife even commented on the "fuzzy" nature of the video. Combine that with the fact that I just can't see myself hooking up another box to my TV, I think this is going to be a product I pass on. I'm going to stick with the 360 for now.

I literally can't believe I didn't think of this. A very easy way to stream Zune to Zune. I'm going to give it a try when I get home tonight.

I saw that Cesar posted the January NPD numbers a couple of weeks ago (yeah, I know I'm behind in posting). For the month of January, Zune held on to its (almost) ten percent market share in the HDD category. That's a pretty impressive number considering January is the slowest month of the year for CE sales. It is been interesting to see the trends in the media versus the sales data. What is even more interesting is that, as Cesar points out, NPD doesn't capture all of the data. Folks like Wal-Mart don't sell that data to NPD (I wonder what they do with it). Our marketing folks tell me that our percentage of untracked data (not from NPD) is significant - meaning our actual share is higher than 10 percent.

apparently, someone has created a hack that tricks the PC into thinking that any PC is the primary PC. I was thinking about this today and I was wondering how useful it really is. I've never had an issue moving content to the device from any PC in guest mode. Also, wouldn't you have to install it on someones PC? I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't want just anybody messing around with my rig. But, hey, to each his own.

So, my good friend Dave was interviewed for TWiT TV the other day. I just got around to listening to the interview. I think he did a great job. It is incredibly difficult doing a live interview (he didn't get the questions beforehand). Leo can be a really tough interviewer, which can make it even more nerve wracking. I thought Dave did a good job avoiding marketing speak and hyperbole. However, I know what I'm getting him for his birthday this year - a new mike!

Some of you may have noticed that posts have been a bit sparse recently. And those of you who have me as a friend on XBL, have noticed that it's been at least a week since I've played GoW. Why, you may ask? Well, it's business planning time. Yep, I've been knee deep in planning and plan approvals. It looks like things MAY be letting up a bit, so you should see a bit more of me. The good news is that things are really coming along nicely. I am really happy with where we are right now. Plans are starting to come together and the team is really humming along. There's an electricity in the air and it is really fun to come to work. And on that note, keep a lookout on http://members.microsoft.com/careers/default.mspx. I've got a couple of BD openings that are being posted. so, if you know of any seasoned BDMs, pass them my way.