Apple is apparently losing ground to Microsoft in the digital media player department - well, at least in one category. According to the latest reviews from reputable sources like PC World, PC Mag, CNet, Wired and YahooTech the newly-released Zune 80 trumps the iPod Classic in almost all departments.

Among the comments are that, for the same price and storage capacity, the Zune 80 is smaller, thinner and lighter, has a larger screen, FM radio, wireless peer-to-peer sharing, wifi syncing with your PC, a great interface, an equally good controller, good battery life, great video performance, a design-customizable back panel and more. Even the Zune Marketplace looks better than the iTunes Store, which Dean Takahashi says looks like a spreadsheet.

This proves you can’t be a loser all the time. Go, Bill!

(I honestly am not sure what these posts about Microsoft digital music players are doing in an Apple-centric blog, except for the fact that these things give us perspective - and make us feel better about our biases.)

More details and official confirmation has come out about the new version of Microsoft’s beleaguered music player. These include:

• pricing - 80gb (harddrive) model costs US$249; the 4gb flash costs US$149, the 8gb US$199; the old 30gb will sell at US$199
• wifi syncing (nice one, actually; no, really)
• the Squircle is real, and is touch sensitive like the iPod’s
• the 80gb version comes only in black, has a 3.2-inch screen and is thinner than the original
• the flash Zunes come in red, green, pink and black
• sorry, none are brown
• no longer WMV-exclusive; you can use h.264 and mpeg4
• squirting is still alive and well
• new sites: Zune Social, Zune Marketplace
• FM Radio
• November launch

Now back to regular programming. (Hey, in case you’d like to know, the iPod Touch started selling at PowerMac Center branches here in Metro Manila beginning this afternoon; the 16gb version goes for around PHP22,900.)

From The Too-True-To-Be-Good Rumor Department:

(Artist’s Concept)

Microsoft, that never say die company, looks to be releasing the Zune 2 next month. Two versions at that, a hard-disk-based one, and a flash memory version. Sounds familiar.

Thinner, flash-based, larger capacity, video playback, the new flash Zune reportedly looks more like a nano than a full-sized iPod, while the HDD version is thinner than the old Zune. Rumor mills are abuzz with the news, but we’ll wait and see in November.

Gluttons.

(Via Engadget)

A blogger posted a big thank you to Apple for making him switch from Vista to Mac, then back to Vista. While on the surface this sounds like a back-handed compliment, it actually makes sense - I think.

Aviv Eyal, co-founder and VP of Grouper Networks (which was eventually acquired by Sony), and co-founder of Friskit, wrote in his blog that Macs made him appreciate Windows Vista, which had previously confounded him no end:

I was getting very frustrated with Vista on several of my PCs and laptops on a daily basis to a point that I stopped enjoying working on computers. On a clean Vista Pro install with just IE, Outlook and Office on strong Dell workstations and on a Vaio laptop, I kept getting hangs and crashes left and right. I now run Vista using the excellent Parallels Desktop for Mac software. It is worth every penny.

Eyal calls Windows the “light” side of the force, and Macs and OS X the “dark” side. He expounds further on this odd compliment:

With 4GB of RAM on a 2.4ghz Intel core 2 duo MacBook Pro laptop, I get very decent performance from Vista running virtually in Parallels, in full-screen mode it is easy to forget that you are not running Vista natively, so if I need to use word or powerpoint I just switch back to the dark side virtually on Parallels and if Vista hangs crashes I just quickly restore the virtual machine to a previous state while I keep working on my Mac apps.

Uh …ok. I think. At least this underscores that fact that there is no reason not to buy a Mac these days. Even if it’s for the wrong reasons.

Check out Eyal’s post on his blog here.

Several days ago users of Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger who used dotMac addresses to get their Windows Live IDs found out that they were being blocked from using the online service. When trying to log in, it would return an error message that told them they had now had to change their address in order to continue using the service.

Because of a recent system update, you must change the email address that you use to sign in to Windows Live Messenger. Until you change your email address, you won’t be able to use Windows Live Messenger.

Eh? Ex-squeeze me? Baking powder?

Other users who registered with other addresses like GMail were not affected, and only those with .Mac-related logins were specifically rejected from the Microsoft service.

MacNN contacted Microsoft about this, and MS officials told MacNN that it had recently become aware of an

…internal error during routine testing that resulted in customers using .Mac domains being asked to change their e-mail address in order to access to their Windows Live IDs.

Internal error. Surrrrre it was. Some code became wonky and spontaneously, independently and without human intervention, began mysteriously blocking their IM users, but somehow only those using dotMac addresses. Internal error. Creepy code, that.

Microsoft immediately created a support page for affected users and further apologized in a statement that read in part:

Access to Live IDs has been restored to our customers who use .Mac domains. We regret any inconvenience this caused for our customers.

Hmph. We regret it too.

(This begs the question: why would some folk who obviously use Macs actually sign up for a Microsoft online service? Does this imply that they deserve what they got? Hmm.)