What is powered by Nvidia's Tegra chip, supports compressed HD video (.h264) playback at a fair clip of 30fps and 1280x720 resolution and has a battery life of 33 hours while playing music? It's Microsoft's Zune HD Portable Media Player, now made available for pre-order in the U.S. by the Redmond giant.
Microsoft's fourth-quarter revenue from its Zune platform dropped by US$100 million, a decline of 54 percent on a year earlier.
They're back: rumours of an impending Zune phone announcement from Microsoft, this time probably at CES.
As expected, Microsoft will offer a new 120GB hardware model and a 16GB flash model in new blue-on-silver and all-black colour schemes. The models will be available on September 16; the Zune 3.0 media player software for Windows will be available for download that same day, and will work with all generations of Zunes.
While Microsoft's Zune may have briefly toppled Apple's iPod from the top of the Amazon.com bestseller's list, US customers are having a hard time getting hold of the new version of the product.
Steve Ballmer isn't necessarily a bad CEO. After all, Microsoft's on strong financial footing. But Ballmer made enough bad product decisions - Zune, Kin, Vista and perhaps Surface - to suggest that Microsoft employees, swayed by a forced-ranking employee rating system, told him what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to hear. If that culture doesn't change, Ballmer's replacement will fare even worse than he did.
