In a move that would make even Engelbert  Humperdink proud the Zune Tattoo Guy has officially changed his name to Zune. Wow, and I thought I was nuts. Well, at least he’s getting some free publicity out of it.

It appears as though good old Wal-Mart (and their inherent market power) have done it again, this time with the Zune 2. The second generation media players which are not supposed to ship for another 12 days have apparently arrived at a St. Louis are Wal-Mart; though the only Zune sporting a price tag is the original 30GB model.

Redmond, Washington

Microsoft’s has not only announced that they will be releasing a plethora of new accessories but that they will be working with 23 additional manufactures’ to ensure the largest possible variety of garnishes for the Zune.

Just in time too, because later this month the second generation of the Zune will hit stores and the web. And, it promises to be a interesting ride this time around since MS also has revamped the Zune to be a Sleeker, more stylish media player, this time around.

Director of marketing for Microsoft’s Zune wing Jason Reindorp, has indicated that within the next few weeks they plan to implement a new strategy for advertising which will focus more on the particular differences between the Zune and Apple’s iPod "We had spiked over the holiday period but naturally tapered out” says Reindorp to theStreet in an resent interview.

We assume they will point to the differences in screen size, ability to customize the screen and its unique wireless file sharing functionality. Hopefully the dissimilarity will become more useful in the near future with less restrictive DRM and the addition of a flash based player. Reindorp failed to comment much regarding the possibility of a flash based device stating only that that’s something the company is considering at the moment.

As for how customer interest for Zune, Reindorp pointed out that downloads from Zune marketplace increased by 60% from January to February, and adds that the overall subscriber base rose by 65%.

As an update to an update, I’d like to let everyone know that I no longer have an issue with song skipping and from what I can tell thus far (after talking to a few friends) it does appear that the problem has been solved. That makes the wait much more understandable for me at least.

To summarize, everything promised appears to be what was delivered with this update. I understand additional issues are incredibly likely to arise and probably very soon; what new products doesn’t have their own growing pains? Remember this is only the first quarter for our Zune, still in the infant stages but breaking away from the colic.

With update v1.3 it appears Microsoft has fixed some problems with the player. For 1) this seems to have solved the issue with sleep mode draining the battery while using the FM tuner, 2) device detection & syncing improvement and 3) Zune Marketplace skiping issue that many users were experiencing ( I know I did and although it wasn’t a huge concern, it did irritate me a little).

 
Even though this was a little later than expected thus far I’ve installed the update and it does indeed appear to have solved the dilemma.