z3bum,

Unfortunately, whereas, I am "passionate" about minis, I am 3 days at a minimum away from mine. It's currently at the NJ VPC and owners lounge says Estimated Delivery 5/5/2007 (today).

So thanks for the invite, but unless you want a ricketty 1999 Jeep Wrangler tagging along, then I'll pass this time and see you next time.

You do have to use MS proprietary software with the Zune, don't you? Not WMP, but something just for that player, sort of like a MS version of iTunes.

As a follow up, I too don't like using the headphone jack because I have to crank it up on the headphone jack and I invariably forget that I have it on 14 or 15, then when I get to my office, I plug in my headphones and inevitable ouch.

But I don't like the dock because it is too big to fit in a standard cup holder, so I've been looking for a good solution. Right now I just live with the headphone jack, and one of those cell phone holder things that grips my zune.

What I really want to do is take apart the zune dock, take out the components inside, and maybe mold my own plastic or something so that I can just drop my zune into a custom dock that fits neatly somewhere in my mini, find a playlist and go.

TheBigNewt

Yes, you use Zune Software that is basically a minimalist version of WMP11. It has a lot of the same dialog boxes, interface elements, but you cannot use WMP11 with the Zune.

A cease fire sounds good to me, but don't think that iPod fans jumped on this thread to criticize the Zune -- they were invided to do so.

From the original post:
So we gave our opinions, as asked.

Also, you shouldn't be surprised to get a response after making a snide remark about a previous post.

Microsoft entered the market and threw a lot of money at it. In the end, they were able to produce better products faster than their competition. Now, if we can't argue that our MINIs are better than their competition, then why do we own them? Something had to make us choose them over other cars. It can be argued that Apple did it right the first time, and MS is playing catch-up.

All this aside, I've found it a little less than perfect when working with the aux. plug. For the Zune, that seems to be the only current option. My audion never comes out as loud as it should. (Yes, I changed the AUX-VOL thing to max.) The output on my iPod or sat. radio is usually at 50%. This combination seems to work the best - anything else and I get that hiss. However, the volume just isn't there.

I love my brown zune. I use it for work and my iPod mini for my car. Best of both worlds

So in my current car (Jeep Wrangler), I have a cassette tape adapter, and a cell phone holder that I use for my zune get-up.
I took my zune dock from my desk, brought it into my car and decided that I would try out the dock (which I had tried long ago).

A couple things that I forgot.

1) If you use the current docks, then plug a headphone jack into the DOCK, it will not play amplified until you provide it power. So I also had a car charger, I plugged it in and that gave it enough juice for me to turn the volume down from 15 (which I normally have it set to) to 4.

2) If you are playing, and you shut off the power to the car, on a Jeep Wrangler, the cigarette lighter immediately goes off. What's odd if the zune keeps playing at what I guess is the "lower volume", so to not chew up battery life? Not quite sure. I was wondering on a mini, when the car is off, does the cigarette lighter go off?

3) If you pull the zune out of the dock (as if you are leaving), it immediately pauses the zune. So if you walking out of the car, yank it from the dock, you don't have to remember to pause it. I love this feature, but I really wish that there was a way that the car could also tell the zune to pause, in case I walk out of the car and leave the zune in the dock charging.

Oh well, I guess this all comes with better integration...

I picked up my mini yesterday 5/10/2007, and I love it. I put my zune dock in, plugged power to it, and plugged it into the Aux port. Works great! I had the volume on the zune at 4 and the sound on the 10 speaker HiFi was great.

It had me dancing in my car, and the endorphines were definately kicking in, so I guess I can't imaging why people are complaining about speaker quality, sound quality and what not.