I’ve been a fan of Zune for a while, which if you’ve never met it is Microsoft music service and software.  It’s a major cloud offering for us, 6m songs stored in the cloud all stream able, downloadable.  Some would say it’s an iTunes competitor, which in many ways it is however the service already has iTunes licked in many ways, not least the software.  The software is beautifully designed, fast and works brilliantly.  That’s not something the you often hear about iTunes on the PC.

Zune is already part of the Xbox experience, part of the PC experience and soon will be on the Phone so it really will follow you everywhere.  On the Xbox the 1080p streaming of movies is astounding.

The best thing about Zune though is Zune pass in my opinion, for £8.99 per month you get unlimited music downloads and streaming.

This is hot news for anyone UK based that wants a ZuneHD, you can have one.  ZuneThings have opened their online ordering for the UK and ok it’s not an official channel, but you probably don’t care about that.  You might though if you’re worried about it breaking down – never fear ZuneThings are proving a 12 month warranty of their own.  They’re nice aren’t they?

The 32GB version is £249 and you’ll get it in the first week of October, if all goes to plan.

[I found out about this from  Zuneboards]

It looks like Ian’s wishes for the Zune HD being an offline extender might be only slightly short of the mark.  Here’s a lovely video of the device in action on a big screen, and boy does it look nice!

[I think this might have been posted by engaged originally, but I got it via this website: http://zunemediaplayer.blogspot.com/2009/08/zunehd-on-hdtv.html]