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This is a great talk…. go check it out…

Vid is here

Anyone out there heard about the new Zune HD? You might hear about it a lot more soon. I wrote about this a while back when there was less info, just an announcement really. But now we have videos and reviews. I have to say it looks impressive so far. And finally something that LOOKS just as good as an Apple product too.

The screen looks great, and this has the new nvidia tegra chipset, so the graphics should be excellent.

Sure it plays music, has an HD radio tuner, video, and all that… but I secretly hope this is just the beginning of the Zune take over of the world. I’m serious. What if they added a UMTS modem? Instant cell phone…. And the Zune OS looks a whole heck of a lot better than the upcoming release of WinMobile…

Ok, and here is the other killer things for Zune (phone or otherwise). Apps. Lets look at programming on Apple vs Microsoft platforms. (For the sake of this exercise, I’m ignoring shell scripts or C++ command line app, etc). For GUI programming and GUI apps you have XCode vs .NET.. and then you have Java on both sides. But Java GUIs are worse than other of the other options, so we can ignore that too. I’ve coded on both sides and I have to say .NET is the easiest development system I’ve ever used, by far. VisualStudio is epic for debugging and development.

So.. Zune goes all app store on us… and you get to use .NET mobile to develop the apps. This would explode overnight. EVERYONE knows C# or VB… but to break into the Apple app store you have to figure out XCode’s development methodology and Obj-C. That sucks. No one uses Obj-C except Apple and I really just don’t like it.

This would be better than Android as well. I’m a big fan of Google and what they are doing with Android, but the SDK is still a bit rough, and the GUI design is no were near as good as what a Microsoft tool would bring.

And the HD has an nvidia chip set. What if we got some mobile version of DirectX? Think about the gaming potential of that too?

So that is my wild dream.. a Zune Phone with a .NET dev tool and an app store… Do it MS… DO IT.

It seems like there is starting to me an uprising in Steve Jobs land. Specifically against the ATT/Apple iPhone situation. More specifically the crazy, illogical way apps can be accepted or rejected, and the sort of closed mindedness that seems to be affecting developers and users. Here are a couple of interesting articles:

Techcrunch

Steve Frank

And now the FCC is asking questions about the Apple rejection of all Google Voice related app. Interesting.

All I know is I’m happy enough with my Android phone and the ability to have a pretty open platform. And I always have my iPod Touch if I really want to try out some of the cooler apps…