(3 October 2007 12:15 pm)

MUMBAI: With the holiday season coming up, Microsoft is going hammer and tongs about taking on market-leader Apple Inc.'s iPod. It has revamped its range of Zune digital media players and software, in a move that it hopes will vault it to second place in the market.

Apple's range of iPods rules the market with 71 per cent share.
Microsoft entered the digital music player market in December 2006, after creating Zune in about six months, but the product failed to take a big share of the overall market.

The new Zunes include Microsoft's first products based on 'flash' memory, a shock resistant storage technology, that is the basis for the most popular digital music players in the market, including Apple's iPod nano.

Though the pricing and storage capacity between the two majors is competitive, Microsoft has redesigned the Zunes to make them thinner and included a new touch sensitive pad for navigating through song collections by letting users either flick their fingers or clicking. Microsoft executives say this will give users more precise control over how they locate content on Zunes than on iPods.

Microsoft has also created an online community called Zune Social which will automatically post to a user's personal web page a list of the music they are listening to on their Zunes. It will further allow users to move that list of music to personal pages on Facebook or other community sites.