It has been awhile since I tried WLW.  Last time I really liked the product, but had a few issues with the editing/formatting.  On a whim, I thought I'd give it another shot.  The team seems to have improved the polish of the product quite a bit.  It is not terribly different, but it is much easier to use in the little things.  I especially like the integration with Blogger.  Good work guys!

By now, there should be a few of the new accessories hitting the shelves. As much as I'd like to divulge the exact products, I'm not allowed to until they become public due to NDAs. However, I can say that you should be seeing a ton of new cases and some new speaker docks to name a few. I'm wondering if anyone has seen them (so I can talk a little more about them) or even purchased some.

I know there are some specials going on on the Zune products today. I was hoping that you guys could share what you seen (and hopefully have taken advantage of). Let us know location, store and price.

Much has been said this week about the 80. Did we make enough or did we not make enough? Are they in store or are they not in stores? Cesar posted about his talks with the PMs this week. Here's what I know. There are 80s to be had. We just picked up three today. I've visited several Targets and seen several there. Incidentally, I saw a guy buy 5 Zune 8s today at Target in Issaquah. If you happen to be that guy and are reading this blog, I'll gladly send you a case! Back to the topic at hand. There are devices available and Cesar says we are making more (which is a good problem to have if you ask me).

I noticed that some folks started to embed their ZuneTags into their websites. I wanted to see how easy it was to do. It turns out it is pretty easy. Use this snippit and replace your personal info and preferences with the ones highlighted in RED. Replace (bracket) with <> respectively.

(bracket)div id="zunecard_big" class="zunecard"(bracket)

(bracket)embed
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://social.zune.net//xweb/lx/swf/zunecard.swf?ver=1192"
style="" id="flashUserCard" name="flashUserCard" bgcolor="#FFF" wmode="opaque"
salign="tl"
flashvars="baseURL=http%3a%2f%2fsocial.zune.net%2fzcard%2fusercardservice.ashx%3fzunetag%3dbillwitt27%26src%3dlarge&MMplayerType=PlugIn"
height="140" width="204"(bracket)

(bracket)/div(bracket)

I made mine pretty small to fit into the template. You could make it much larger.

I've talked about MoodLogic before. In many ways, it is the precursor to things like Pandora. It was created by a very smart guy who used user data to collect information about songs that is much deeper than what is available from CDDB, AMG, etc (ironically, his company was acquired by one of the others, but that is a different story). I was building a few playlists because it is time to hit the gym after gaining a few pounds in the pre-launch run-up. I remembered how good ML was and decided to see if anything had been changed. It turns out, they have released a new version (v2). I don't know when they did it, but one of the new features is that is it free for your first 10,000 songs. That is very cool. I'm busy building new playlists as we speak. Just curious, do you guys have any tools for building contextual playlists that I don't know about?

I know I said I'd pick a winner in the masthead contest awhile ago. Well, I finally got around to it tonight. the Winner is T-Bone. T-bone not only provided a cool masthead, but also customized wallpapers for the device. How can you beat that? I've got prizes for everyone who sent me something. You know the drill, send me you address offline.

PS T-bone, I'm not sure my wife will allow me to use some of the images.

I'd love to hear your experiences (both good and bad) on upgrading today. One rule - Let's not make this into a battle of iPod versus Zune. I am legitimately interested in how well things went today. I already shared my experiences below.

So we had internal postings three times today to aggregate the reviews as they came in. It was really nice to see a lot of positive feedback. I only saw one really negative review and I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of folks in the comments stick up for us. It actually made my day. I also saw a couple of posts that started out negative for various reasons, but were updated throughout the day. I thought that was really big of the authors. In the end, I couldn't have asked for a better launch day. I'm now waiting with baited breath for the WSJ review.

Awhile ago I hinted a some of the cool stuff you could do with the new products. I obviously didn't want to give away any of the surprises, so I held off talking about them until after launch. Well, launch day is here.

One of my favorite features is wireless sync when attached to the AV dock. So here's the scenario. When plugged in, the device will automatically poll the client after one minute of inactivity. If you set you Zune to automatically sync your content, then the device will go idle and then poll for anything new. Let's say you have you dock connected to your stereo. If you add new music while working on your PC and then go into the next room, it is already there waiting for you. this also works for your videos. If you've got it plugged into your TV, you can directly watch your shows. VERY cool. Yep, I know I'm a corner case. but it is REALLY nice not to have to shuttle back and forth from the living room to the den.

I posted a few items to my Zune Card today. Plus, I already had a few messages from a couple of friends. That is really cool! You can find me at http://social.zune.net/member/BillWitt27

At work, I am usually the one of the first to start to dogfood a product. While it is great to get advanced views into what the team is doing, you also tend to lose sight of the first out of box experience for the customers. By the time it hits the shelves, you've been using it for so long the it is old hat. So, I've taken to keeping my home and my work completely separate. This morning, I updated the software just like everyone else.

This evening, I spent a bunch of time going through it to see if I could find any glaring errors or omissions. I'm happy to say, the experience of upgrading was very painless. Ironically, it was easier to get on my home machine than my work machine because of all of the times I installed/reinstalled at work over the last few months.

I then added several devices and upgraded the firmware. No issues on a 4, 8, or 30. I even found a feature I wasn't aware of in the dogfood. The ability to flip though all the devices currently installed on the machine (not the content, but the names, colors, etc). Very cool.

I had heard of people having issues with album art migration. I've got store purchased content, manually added content and ripped content. All of it cam through. I had actually expected some of the drag and drop albums to be skipped, but nope, they worked just fine.

I added wireless sync to the flash products. Worked like a charm (after I added the MAC address to my MAC filtered router. Ooops).

The one issue I did have was a strange bug with one song from one artist. For some reason, a 10,000 Maniacs track kept displaying tack 14 first. the rest of the album was fine. It isn't a big deal, but it was a bit strange. Other than that, my personal collection is up and running great. I'm super excited to finally run it live.

I've seen a few posts today about the Yellow (or Citron) Zunes. I've also seen a lot of speculation as to whether this is a "hidden" product. I'll shed a little light on this. They do exist. They are the ship-gifts given to the team for launching the product. Just like last year when we gave out Magenta and Orange devices, these are a special run just for us. There you have it, mystery solved.

P.S. I have to say, I really, really like mine. Good job manufacturing team!

One of the side benefits of my activities is that I got to show my family some of the new Zune features and get (brutally) honest feedback from them. I was surprised at how well received it was across the board. The most enthusiastic were the folks who did not one an MP3 player at all. they loved the simplicity of the product. Even the iPod owners commented on how easy it was. most also LOVED the ZunePad. It was actually fun to see them flicking through long lists of songs for no other purpose than to see the tracks scroll by. I've told them all to update their Zunes tomorrow and download the new client and then give me more feedback, which I'll post as it comes in.

Sorry to be gone for so long. What was supposed to be a vacation, turned into something else. My father passed away and we had some things to take care of. Sorry to be a bit of a downer, but the good news is that we've finished with the services and I can get back to focusing on the launch.

I'll be off the grid for a couple of days. I will be back just in time for launch. I hope to be able to give you guys a little more insight after launch day!

The first Zune v2 commercial aired here in Seattle on My Name Is Earl at 8:48PM. Did you guys see it? What do you think?