Gadget Chain Blog

 This ain't the Kool-Aid talking

I needed something to amuse me. I'm on my way to a funeral and anything to keep my mind off the tragedy and sadness will be welcome. I pull out my Zune and flip through some of my music looking to make a quick list. Just out of curiosity I click on the Community menu to see if I'm the only one in the world that has bought a Zune. I get the circular moving dots that tell me that its searching for other Zune devices and lo and behold "Chito" shows up. Wow--I'm amazed. Someone else in the Seattle airport has a Zune and they're nearby. I look around to see if I see anyone listening to music. I see a young man sitting a few seats down from me listening to his music. I thought to myself, "Let's see if this thing works." I browse through my gallery and find some cool (for me) backgrounds and click "send to Chito". I wait. I watch. I see him look around to see if there is anyone he knows around. Not seeing that its me, he accepts the files I send him. I can see that he's listening to some music by a group that I don't recognize, but I make the assumption that it's probably Hip-Hop or Rap. So I browse my Rap genre and send him one the songs in my Rap category (1 of 3). He reciprocates with sending me an old school R&B song. Nice. I already have it, but that was cool.
This exchange goes on for about an hour and it occurs to me that this is the killer feature of the Zune. This is the reason why people would buy it. Here we were; a teenager and an old guy sending each other stuff via Zune. We didn't know each other from the man in the moon. We probably won't ever see each other again, but I will remember this exchange and it cheered me up. For an hour, I forgot about death and sadness. For an hour, I shared something cool with someone. Random Acts of Kindness via Zune.

Everybody needs a Zune!

With a FM Tuner, 80 gigabytes of storage space, and the ability the share music, pictures and I assume videos with other Zune users makes the Zune 2 a great holiday gift for $249 US.