It's quiet... too quiet...
Microsoft said Wednesday that it was working to debug the 30-gigabyte Zune, following a flood of online customer complaints about the digital music players freezing up.
(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)
“We are aware that customers with the Zune 30GB are experiencing issues with their Zune device. We are actively working now to isolate the issue and develop a solution to address it,” the company said in an e-mail.
Microsoft also said customers can go to zune.net/support for updates.
Earlier, the company said on the site that the issues involved booting the digital music player’s hardware. Later, it added that the Zune Social, an online community where users can share music, “might be slow or inaccessible.”
There are several models of Zune players, some with flash memory storage and others with hard drives up to 120GB. Users of the 30GB model began reporting problems on a Microsoft message board early Wednesday. Customers similarly are saying that their digital music players get stuck on the Zune logo screen as it appears to load, and efforts to unjam the device are mostly fruitless.
As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 2,000 comments had been posted on Microsoft's Zune message board in response to an entry entitled “Help-frozen zune!!!!”
“My Zune has managed to freeze itself with the Zune logo and the loading bar on the screen and none of the buttons are responding, rebooting isn't responding, plugging it into the computer isn't responding, nothing is working, and it was working a mere two hours ago,” one person wrote.
Since the massive freeze struck shortly before New Year’s Eve, some users have dubbed it “Z2K,” a play off the Y2K bug feared to crash computers in 2000.
Emotions were running high on the Zune message board as some users said they were about to cry and others went so far as to say they might even die without their player. Others cut in, telling people to “CHILL OUT.”
A few do-it-yourselfers report having attempted an ambitious fix that involves taking the Zune apart and removing the battery with success. But most users, some afraid to dismantle their device, are waiting for Microsoft to find a solution.
The price tag of the Zune 30 was slashed by $50 to $199 in 2007. The 30GB version was the first portable music player by Microsoft, which brought it to market in 2006. Originally just dubbed the Zune, it was later renamed Zune 30 when additional models hit stores.
The Zune has between 3 to 4 percent of the digital music player market, which is dominated by Apple’s iPod, with more than 70 percent of the market. Microsoft has sold more than 2 million Zunes. In contrast, Apple sold about 10.6 million iPods alone in the first quarter of 2008.
SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28449091/
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