Touching is good.

I think the Nintendo PR guy who thought up that catch phrase must be patting himself on the back right now. So far, I've shown about three other people the Surface machine and the general consensus has been very positive.

This week debuted yet another touch based media device. I am talking of course about the Zune HD. Being the proud owner of a (now) retro 16GB Zune, I can safely say from experience that Microsoft is on the right track. The software is fluid and lightweight. The flip side of this is that it lacks versatility in terms of codec support. The hardware has always been solid. As someone who primarily uses his Zune solely for music, I don't plan on purchasing a Zune HD anytime soon; I think I'd actually miss my squircle anyway.

Personally, I don't see the hype of these new touch devices. Call me old fashioned, but there's nothing quite as satisfying as the click of a hardware button. That was the beauty of the old Zune squircle; it was a touchpad, but also incorporated a center and directional buttons, with Play and Back buttons on either side. All the functionality was right there. (Ironically, I never liked the iPod's circle. The design itself is not intuitive, but rather learned because of the device's prevalence. But, hey, that's your luxury when you're a market leader; Microsoft has done the same in it's core divisions.) When you move to a completely touch based device, functionality gets put in menus.

Now that Microsoft has a foothold, it needs to consolidate. In terms of media distribution, the Zune Marketplace needs to be spread out among their other devices. Probably the best example for this is the Xbox Video Marketplace which offers video rentals at a price on par with Blockbuster. Except you don't get a week to watch your purchase, only one viewing. Useless. Bring people the video content already available for Zune. Also, functionality needs to become more uniform. Windows 7 uses the media framework developed with Vista, but includes new native codec support. The Zune player should be able to at least play everything allowed by WMP12. With more media support, using a Zune HD with your TV becomes a very attractive proposition. For now, I'll have to stick to that 25ft. HDMI cable I picked up on Amazon and Hulu.

-Tom

P.S. - It looks like we can use the Surface SDK on x64 Windows!
Check it out!