I have been using one since July 07. It replaced my iPod nano and my iPod 1st gen Touchwheel. I can honetly say it blows any iPod that I’ve ever seen (sans Touch, as much as I hate the trendy iPod scene, it does look like a marvelous device) far out of the water.

Imagine for a moment, that you can download all the new music you want for the price of a single CD each month. The price of buying that Will Smith album on iTunes will let you get every album he has ever released as well as every top-40 album released in the last decade. For the early adopters such as myself, this has been a huge deal. Another interesting aspect of the subscription content is that if you “squirt” [that's a gross term!] subscripton content from your Zune to your friend’s, and they too have a subscription, they can sync the content and play it so long as they don’t let their subscription expire. After convincing my friends to get Zunes becaus I liked mine because of the subscription, we started sharing playlists. Furthermore, you can “jump in” [MSFT marketing terms are weird] to the community and see ALL the music that cool hipster guy sitting next to you on the bus listens to, and can grab his playlists and find good new music the lazyman’s way. I suppose this sort of functionality makes sense to overlook… I mean, it’s not really related to the device experience, right?

OK Walt, so you don’t listen to new music… What happens when you lose your collection from iTunes? If you are synced to too many computers or have reached your download limt in iTunes, you are fubar’d. In the case of subscription content, you just redownload it, replace it, get remixes of it. Who cares! Access to your music collection is connected to your login. [And this is a fairly ubiquitous login too, passport has been around since near the dawn of the Internet, remember the "electronic wallet"] Yes, if you stop your subscription you will stop being able to listen to your music. The whole “subscrition” concept can be a little disconcerting — if you are extremely compelled to listen to a song until the end of your days, buy it. Purchased (mind you there is PURCHASED and SUBSCRIPTION) content from the Zune marketplace will play forever, you don’t have to login to reactivate it, it will play in Windows forever, it will play on your Zune forever, and you can reverse sync it from your Zune back to your PC in the event that your dog eats your computer or something.

Comparing the subscription experience to the purchase experience (something that I haven’t seen done yet) is NOT like comparing apples to apples. These are oranges we’re talking about in the case of the marketplace, ORANGES! Subscription is a big deal, I do not know anyone who has actually tried it, used it for a month and then decided to go back to buying CDs / MP3s / AACs.

Mr. Mossberg, I hate to put it like this, but reviewing the service without actually trying out the subscription content is like reviewing the TV and only comparing its audio fidelity to a radio without considering the fact that there are moving pictures. Next time you take a look at a Zune product, make sure you check out all the features!

as for the above comments on tech. specs., it’s good to look at specsheets every now and then. how else would you know that the Zune 80 outputs DVD quality video (720×480) via TV out and is supported by an AV dock that sports Component Video connectors (yes RGB cables)?

at the end of the day, you shouldn’t compare two products even if they are competing against each other, if it is that you are in the market for a device. you should instead choose one that best matches your requirements.