What is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra chip, supports compressed HD video (.h264) playback at a fair clip of 30fps and 1280×720 resolution and has a battery life of 33 hours while playing music?
It’s Microsoft’s Zune HD Portable Media Player, now made available for pre-order in the U.S. by the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant.
Yes, the Zune has always been a tantalizing device. With the Zune HD, Microsoft has upped the stakes in its bid to be the ultimate iPod killer (yes, whether you like it or not, the Zune HD will be compared to the ubiquitous Apple device).
The list of features and specs is droolworthy: a 3.3 inch OLED touchscreen at 480×272 resolution, Wi-Fi, up to 8.5 hours of video playback, 16 or 32GB of storage depending on the model and support for HD Radio. All this for a price of $220 for the 16GB model and $290 for the 32GB model.