I bought my sister a white 30GB Zune last year for Christmas and just upgraded the firmware to the latest version which revamped the UI. Up til now, I’ve heard amazing things about the new “squircle” interface on the new Zunes and how great the new Zune software looked. So I figured it was worth upgrading my sister’s firmware to at least get her the better looking UI on the device.

First thing to call out was that I was able to connect my sister’s zune to my PC and upgrade the firmware without associating/tying it to my PC and wiping the music off of it. Apple is maniacal in the way it associates an iPod to a PC.

After upgrading, much to my surprise, it also enabled wireless sync’ing of music which was noticeably absent when the Zune first launched last year. I was shocked by this because I wouldn’t have been surprised for Microsoft to say “Sorry, you bought v1 and to get the new features you need to spring for a new unit“. Kudos to Microsoft for taking care of our existing customers.

We wanted to swap some music from my PC to her Zune, and vice versa. I was skeptical that this would even work with visions of evil DRM tactics in my head. I was SHOCKED to find out that not only do we support this scenario for non-DRM music, but it did it in such an elegant way.

When a zune is connected to a PC and you’re browsing your collection, you can right click on any song, album or artist and select “Sync to <Zune>” (where <ZUNE> is your device’s name). Conversely, when you’re browsing the contents of your Zune, you can choose “Sync to PC”.

The best part is that all the sync’ing (even 2 way) happened async so I could do other things with the Zune software while this was all happening. iTunes, on the other hand, likes to constantly throw up modal dialog boxes which prevents you from interacting with the client to do anything else.

In the last few months, I migrated my music from my local HD to a RAID’d NAS. After doing this move, iTunes’ performance got extremely sluggish and basic things like searching are were super painful.

The Zune software handled my NAS setup like a champ and it was as if all the music was still local on my PC. Performance was amazing (including search!) and UI was snappy to respond.

Overall, I not only found the supported scenarios very compelling (and surprising!) but the software was extremely easy to use. It really does make iTunes look like a spreadsheet. Microsoft really deserved massive credit here, not just for the good looking UI and squircle, but also giving customers a viable, and in many cases a better, alternative to the iPod. Who said it would take 3 versions for us to get it right?