Speed Racer tanked over the weekend as I predicted/hoped. 20 million and second place over the weekend with bad reviews to boot.

Last week the new Zune software 2.5 update came out. It looks like it fixed a few things that were bugging me, which is great. since moving to 1.0 to 2.0 I have noticed some wma files were orphaned on the player. they were not seen by the software and they player doesn't allow deletion directly. so I have a number of files that were invisible. the visual upgrade was worth it though. The 2.5 update seems to have handled the orphan problem and I finally have it all cleared out again. One this that is still annoying, is that if you are listening to a long file and you pause it, watching a movie or doing something else will cause you to lose your place. I guess they assumed there was no need to bookmark audio files, but I listen to a lot of radio shows, podcasts, etc. so the lack of bookmarks is a pain. Maybe the next update.

Overall I love the zune. it supports a wide range of formats and the movie playback is great. I wish it had a more open format though, like the ability to explore it as an external drive or read pdfs, etc.

They did add one great feature. Games. Microsoft also released the xna framework community tech preview for the zune. It works on all existing zunes and it will be more prominate with the next generation player. If you are a .net programmer, it is very easy to get something running on the zune. there are even a examples roaming around to give you a head start. You need Visual Studio 2008 and currently it only supports 32bit. Team XNA blog has a lot of good information and links. Also take the time to read the readme after installation.

One last good link. Gamesutra has an article that details the storage, networking, graphics, etc. available and what you can and cannot do. Great starting point.