This article is part of the series What to Buy Christmas This Christmas. This series of articles goes over this season’s biggest items and their competitors. Helping you, the reader, make informed purchase decisions this holiday season.

Christmas is growing ever closer. And this year people have several decisions to make in what technology to buy. Over the next three weeks we are going to be look at several hot products for this holiday season and the pros can cons of each. Hopefully this will give people some insight on what gifts to buy for their friends and loved ones so that they can buy with the confidence that they will be giving a gift that will be loved for years to come. The items we are going to start with are the Microsoft Zune and the Apple iPod.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft finally released its own, in-house built, iPod competitor. After several attempts at the digital market crown and failing on their various endeavors. Microsoft finally decided they needed to release their own portal media player. The hype surrounding the Zune up until weeks of its release was high. Everyone wanted one to play with and everybody was curious. Microsoft held the list of missing features back until just days before the Zune’s release and even had reviewers sign an outrageous reviewers agreement. Microsoft gets points for the set up, but fails to follow through. The Zune was released to less than stellar numbers and the cat was out of the bag on what it could not do. But just because the Zune can not do some things its competitor can’t, does that mean it is a bad product?

Lets begin with a list of things the iPod can do that the Zune can not. Probably the most important missing feature is the ability to use the Zune as a USB hard drive. iPods have an option out of the box that allows them to be used as external hard drives. Making purchasing a 30GB or 80GB model that much more appealing since, not only can it play movies and music but, it can also store your documents between your home and office. The iPod also has basic organizer functionality built in including a contact list, calendar, and a notes section. Such features are absent from the Zune. The Zune is also missing features like: volume limiting, games, and music store selection. So with that little bit out of the way, lets move on.

What does the Zune do? In the most simplistic of terms, it is a media player. This means that the Zune can play your music, movies, and display your digital photos. If you have music in Mp3, WMA, unprotected AAC, or WAV formats, then you are good to go on supported formats for music. Supported video formats include MPEG4 and WMV. So, your basic formats are supported and you should not have any trouble loading songs onto the device. The Zune is capable of wirelessly connecting to other Zunes for the purposes of sharing songs with the Zunes it finds. This is one thing the iPod can not do. Transferred songs can be listened to up to a total of 3 times within 3 days of being received. After that they become place holders for later purchase from the Zune Marketplace. If you are looking for a device that will play music and movies while allowing you to occasionally look at your photos then the Zune will do it for you.

The Zune Marketplace is the online music store that allows you to purchase music to go on your Zune. If you have a Rhapsody or Yahoo! Music subscription, then you are out of luck here because those Play For Sure stores are currently incompatible with the Zune. The Zune Marketplace allows users to purchase music one of two ways. The first is a 99 cents per song price tag that is done by using a points system that is similar to the XBox Live Marketplace. The second way you can purchase songs using the Zune Marketplace is to utilize their Zune Pass which is an “All you can eat” subscription service for 14.99 a month. A subscription service is something that the iTunes Store currently lacks. While rumors continue to float about Apple adding a subscription based service, one has yet to materialize. The biggest drawback to the Zune Marketplace is Microsoft’s direct shunning of its Play For Sure stores already in existence, including it’s own URGE store in which in launched not even a year ago with MTV. If you do not already have a subscription to one of Microsoft’s Play For Sure stores then you are probably okay. In my opinion, the iTunes Store from Apple could really benefit from a subscription service.

Those are the two main pieces of the Zune puzzle, the Zune player and the Zune Marketplace. I think Microsoft got a lot of things right in their version 1 player. I expect that in time the Zune has a real chance at competing against the iPod, at least as the iPod stands today. Since no one is really sure exactly what Apple has up its sleeve for MacWorld in January, you can be sure that something big is on the horizon. Apple does not plan on playing second fiddle to Microsoft when it comes to the digital media realm. Apple already has a nice head start and they do not plan to rest on their laurels.

The final word in the iPod versus Zune for this writer is going to be the iPod. The Zune is still version one and while I think it has potential I think shoppers are much better off going with the iPod this holiday season. The iPod is already where the Zune wants to be so why settle? My opinion might change in a couple of years, but that is a couple of years from now. The iPod has more features and better accessories market at the moment so it is the clear winner right now. If the person you are shopping for absolutely hates Apple products, then a Zune is perfect.

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