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According to Microsoft’s official press release, this new portable device is more than just an ordinary media player.

“We are introducing a new platform that helps bring artists closer to their audiences and helps people find new music and develop new social connections,” said spokesman J. Allard, who is leading the charge for building the family of Zune products at Microsoft.

Among the drawbacks, however, is that one is only allowed to listen to a shared song three times or for three days, whichever comes first. The reason is that all items sent wirelessly Zune-to-Zune are wrapped up in DRM for safe encoding.

So all one can do is “flag it right on your device and easily purchase it from the Zune Marketplace,” the press release promises.

“Inspired by the vast and varied community of music fans, Zune focuses on helping emerging artists shape the digital canvas,” Microsoft asserts.

Taras Tarlov, sophomore, from the ITS help desk in Bush Library quickly agreed that the Zune is not something super new or a possible next fad like the iPod has been since it was first released in December 2001.

“People really like iPods because they are so easy to use,” Tarlov said.

The Zune, on the contrary, has a lot of special features, such as a built in FM tuner, the capability to process various formats, the wireless sharing device and the ability to connect it to an Xbox, if you have one.

Admittedly, those features aren’t really new and mainly serve to make Microsoft’s new entertainment device really expensive (the price is not released yet, but experts estimate $300), and probably more difficult to use.

“If you want an MP3 player for playing music and videos only, iPod is probably still the best thing to get at the moment,” Tarlov said. “It has a processor. So you can’t really compare it to an iPod anyway. It’s rather something like a PDA.”

Zune will probably not be the infamous iPod killer when it finally gets launched, presumably in November.