Windows Phone 7 includes a music player that looks strikingly similar to the software that comes on the Zune HD media player. Soon it looks like the video games and other apps designed for the Zune HD may also be available for Windows Phone 7.

I reviewed the Zune HD a few years ago and I was impressed at how well the little guy with an NVIDIA Tegra processor and widescreen touch display performed as a media player. I was underwhelmed by the tiny number of apps for the platform, especially when compared with the hundreds of thousands of apps available for the Apple iPod touch. But there were a few gems, including a Texas Hold ‘em poker game that I grew rather fond of.

In a recent podcast, a Microsoft exec explained that the company is looking at porting some of the apps it developed for the Zune HD to Windows Phone 7. There are a handful of third party apps for the Zune HD, and it’s entirely up to the developers of those apps to decide if they’ll launch WP7 versions, but it looks like the first party apps will be making the leap soon.

Another interesting tidbit is that Microsoft is working to bring more apps to the Zune HD as well. Windows Phone Secrets reports that some of those apps may include an email app, a note-taking app, and several additional games.

I’d love to see Microsoft release a next-gen Zune media player that simply runs Windows Phone 7 so that users can choose from the thousands of apps available for that platform instead of the dozens of apps available for the Zune HD. But I suppose this is still good news for Windows Phone and Zune HD users alike.

Microsoft has a tool for synchronizing media between a Mac and a Windows Phone 7 device. But for some reason there’s no official tool for doing the same thing with a Zune media player — even though the Zune platform has been around longer than Windows Phone 7. The folks at ZuneBoards have figured out something interesting though: You can use the Windows Phone 7 Connector app for Mac to sync with a Zune or Zune HD media player.

In order to get it to work properly you’ll need to tweak some settings. First you download and run the connector once to create a preference file. Then you have to open a terminal window and enter a command. Once you’re done, you should be able to sync media between a Zune and a Mac computer.

The Microsoft Zune HD is an excellent portable media player, but it’s capable of being much more. The Zune software is actually based on Windows CE, which means there are thousands of third party apps that should be able to run on the Zune HD — if only there were a way to install them. Now there is.

ZuneBoards member Netrix developed an app called Liberate which lets you run some Windows CE and Windows Mobile apps on the Zune HD by killing the Zune HD user interface and bringing up the Windows CE explorer.

Users have found that they can run a number of popular Windows CE apps including the Opera Mini web browser, Foxit PDF reader, CorePlayer and TCPMP media players, Pigeon IM app, ScummVM and even PockedDOS — a DOS emulator for Windows Mobile.

Unforutnately the FPSEce Playstation emulator crashes when you try to load games… but if someone can find a fix, you might actually be able to play PS1 games on a Zune HD. How cool would that be?

You can find out more about Liberate for the Zune HD at the ZuneBoards forum.

via Engadget and ZuneBoards

Ever wish the home screen on your Android phone looked more like the Zune HD launcher? Yeah, me neither. But there’s an app for that anyway.

Scan to download

Zune Home is a $0.99 app available in the Android Market that replicates the basic look and feel of the Zune HD app launcher. Instead of a series of shortcuts and widgets, the Zune Home screen features a list of apps which you can scroll through to launch your most frequently used programs. The app is customizable, allowing you to pin any app to the home screen, or to choose any app you like for the default actions such as contacts, messaging, email, or Twitter.

At its core, Zune Home launcher is kin do f a one-trick pony though. It doesn’t actually bring the Zune HD media player to your phone, for instance. And it doesn’t include the same 3D effects when you actually launch apps. It just gives you a scrollable program list on your home screen.

You can check out a brief video demo from Android Central after the break.

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There may only be about a dozen apps for the Zune HD in the Zune Marketplace. But third party hackers are doing their best to turn the handheld media player into a full-fledged mobile computer. A few weeks ago we saw the launch of an independent development kit that made it possible to write games and other apps that would take advantage of the Zune HD’s 3D graphics capabilities. And now a developer has ported a Nintendo Game Boy emulator to the Zune HD.

At the moment it can handle Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, but no Game Boy Advance titles. The emulator is still a bit rough around the edges. It doesn’t’ support audio, for instance. But the latest release adds support for saved game states, which is something.

You can check out a video of the emulator in action after the break.

via Engadget

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When I reviewed the Zune HD portable media player a few months ago, I was impressed with the user interface and overall audio and video playback performance. But I was a bit disappointed with the limited video codec support. Now Microsoft is doing that. Engadget and Gizmodo are both reporting that Microsoft will offer updated software within the next few weeks that, among other things, will add support for Xvid and other MPEG-4 codecs that had not previously been supported — but not DivX.

Another new feature is support for Smart DJ playlists. Currently, Smart DJ can create instant playlists based on criteria you select — but only using the Zune desktop software. The Zune HD 4.5 firmware update will let you use SmartDJ on a device.

What’s even cooler is that when you’re connected to WiFi, you’ll be able to stream music directly from the Zune Marketplace — if you have a monthly Zune Pass subscription. This makes SmartDJ something of a cross between the iPhone/iPod touch Genius playlist function and an internet radio app like Pandora.

Now if only Microsoft would issue an update that would allow more third party apps to run on the Zune HD.

First Generation Zune HD

Want some of the cool new features of Windows Phone 7 Series, but don’t feel like shelling out the cash for a new phone and a monthly data plan? It looks like you may be able to pick up the equivalent of an iPod Touch. ZDNet is reporting that Microsoft is working on a Zune HD2.

The next-generation Zune HD will reportedly run Windows Phone 7 Series and allow you to run the same third party apps you would get on a smartphone. And that includes games based on the upcoming XNA Game Studio 4.0.

Unfortunately, the original Zune HD will only support XNA Game Studio 3.1, which means it will likely not be able to run all of the apps designed for Windows 7 Phones and the next-generation Zune HD.

This is all a rumor for now, but it’s one that I’m really hoping is true. There’s no word on how much the next-generation Zune HD would cost or what kind of specs it would have.

via Gizmodo

Microsoft’s Zune HD is a touchscreen portable media player that has a number of things going for it. It’s thin, light, and has a brilliant OLED display. It can play 720p WMV and H.264 videos, which means you may be able to copy movies from your collection without transcoding them first. But the device doesn’t actually have an HD display. Instead, it has a 480 x 272 pixel widescreen display that’s actually smaller than the iPod Touch screen, which may come as a surprise to anyone that assumes a devices with HD in its name would actually display HD video.

The Zune HD is also one of the first consumer electronics devices to use the new NVIDIA Tegra platform, which bundles an ARM-based processor with NVIDIA graphics. This is how the low-power media player can play high bitrate HD video flawlessly. The Tegra processor also enables 3D graphics effects which show up in menu animations and in some of the handful of applications currently available for the Zune HD.

The folks at NVIDIA sent me a Zune HD to review for a few weeks. I recently took it on vacation to put it through the paces. The model featured in this review has 16GB of storage. A 32GB version is also available.

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