I haven’t been paying close attention to the news today but this caught my eye:
Microsoft’s Zune Hit With Glitch
By Jessica Hodgson, Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2009
Microsoft Corp.’s Zune portable music player is suffering from a glitch that may have frozen thousands of units, in the latest setback for the world’s biggest software company.
On Wednesday, Zune owners flooded blogs and Internet chat sites to complain that they couldn’t listen to music on the 30 gigabyte version of the Zune, an early version of the device, because it wouldn’t start up properly. The postings noted that the digital music players get stuck on the Zune logo screen when the machine’s software is loading.
A message on the Zune support Web site acknowledged the problem and informed customers Microsoft was working to address it, but didn’t identify the cause. Microsoft declined to say how many devices were affected.
“We are aware that customers with Zune 30GB devices are experiencing issues with their Zune device,” a Microsoft spokesman, in a separate statement, said.
“We are actively working now to isolate the issue and develop a plan to address it. We will keep customers informed on next steps via the support page on zune.net.”
The Zune devices appear to have started freezing early Wednesday, according to multiple blog postings. In a video posted on the Internet, one Zune user described how his device, after having been fully charged, froze and wouldn’t move past the Zune user screen. Read the rest…
Jennifer LeClaire has more at Newsfactor.com:
While the rumor mill is focused on Apple developing a larger-screen iPod touch, the blogosphere is churning with angry reports about frozen 30GB Microsoft Zunes.
Discussions board like ZuneUser.com, ZuneScene.com and Zune.net offer first-hand accounts of the problems with Microsoft’s music player. It seems the Zunes reboot, then freeze once the status bar reaches 100 percent.
Some are calling it the “Z2K” problem, playing off the infamous Y2K bug that many thought would throw the computing industry in chaos at the beginning of the century when dates changed from 1999 to 2000. That’s because the problem seems to have started at exactly midnight PST Wednesday — the first moments of the last day of 2008.
Makes me glad I bought an iPod.