How many zune hd have been sold

Been waiting to get your hands on the much-hyped Zune HD? The company has also said the device will be available in five colors, but has not elaborated on what those colors might be.

The Zune HD will go into direct competition with the iPod Touch, and as such it seems it will be a worthy competitor. Both touchscreen devices are Wi-Fi enabled, display video in HD, and provide gaming capabilities.

But per usual, Microsoft is playing from behind; we can expect Apple to drop the price of the iPod Touch line sometime before the Zune HD hits store shelves. The Zune is about the only memorable device to stand strong against the iPod horde. Only cheap SanDisk players separate it from the iPods. The Zune Marketplace subscription comes to mind as Apple roles out a more modern version. The Zune name will live on. Windows Phone 7 uses the brand for locally-stored media. The name is important to Microsoft.

But the timing feels off. One frequent contributor to the forum, year-old Erick Leach, reminds me that, in its heyday, the Zune came equipped with a fairly robust social media appendage: Zune owners could send songs to each other wirelessly and unlock Xbox Live-like achievements for the music they listened to — both novel features in the mids. The brand never managed to muster the cultural ubiquity of the iPod Apple attempted its own failed social network, Ping, around the same time , but with that emphasis on community, perhaps it was inevitable for the Zune to eventually mount a cult-like fandom.

He always felt like there was a massive nation of Zune-heads out there who he would surely meet someday. Leach believes the Zune has aged better than people might think. Simply and effectively. The Zune Marketplace offered a genuine streaming subscription — long before that became the dominant way people consumed music — which never caught on. Woods tells me that solidarity among Zuners has never been stronger. He finds even more thrills in this strange afterlife, as the years have eroded away everyone except for the zealots.

He can scour the earth in search of every last scrap of Zune memorabilia with the confidence that there will be an audience willing to upvote his efforts indefinitely. He can strap an absurdly huge SSD on the motherboard, ensuring that it will never be replaced. Redmond made it official Wednesday, quietly announcing the Zune is no more and leaving the few people still using the damn thing wondering where they go from here.

To the iPod, of course. Or the Pono. Probably not the Pono. Wherever they go, the bigger question is how do those few Zune diehards pick up the pieces? Although Microsoft will "retire" Zune services on Nov.