Enjoy Your Hamburger Along With Free Wi-Fi for Your Zune

It is not all that often when the technology blogosphere gets particularly excited about anything announced by Microsoft but today’s news of Zune 3.0 released along with software update and free Wi-Fi access for Zune owners in McDonald’s fast food chain is generating immense buzz today. And the range of new features is really impressive enough to deserve this type of buzz and I even think that such announcements can really help some potential customers finally make a decision to buy Zune when evaluating various media players on the market.

So here are the new things Zune owners should expect their media players to be able to do once they update the software:

Free Wi-Fi access in 9,800 participating MacDonald’s restaurants in the US to buy music from Zune Marketplace. Of course, since Zune is not equipped with any browser the Wi-Fi connection can only be used to download music and games from the Zune store only.

Unlimited Zune Pass subscriptions for $14 per month in addition to the usual ability to pay per track purchased. What’s more, all the new users are offered 14-day free trial of the unlimited subscriptions so they may very well use at least these two weeks to download as much as they can. I believe the Zune Pass subscribers will be the heaviest users of this downloading functionality for unlimited music downloads.

Buy from FM. This is the functionality to buy music that you listen on the built-in FM radio. When you are online you can buy and download the chosen song from a participating station immediately while when offline you can tag the song for a later purchase.

Channels functionality that is basically a personalized music recommendation system for Zune owners. Channels will be pushing new music to a Zune owner every week based on his or her music tastes. I believe that if recommendations are relevant enough, channels will help Microsoft make Zune owners buy more music. But we should expect suggestions to be of high quality since Microsoft will employ radio DJs and genre experts to build the recommendations.

Audio books via Audible where Zune will be able to choose books, magazines, and newspapers to buy from more than 50 thousand titles available.

It is important to mention that the new software as well as free Wi-Fi are available for the older Zune models, not only the new ones (8 Gb and 16 GB flash-based models and 120 Gb hard-drive model) released today.

The only bad part that I see in today’s announcement is that now that Zune owners are offered free Wi-Fi to download all the music they want to their media players when in a McDonald, is that chances are too many devices will face the danger of getting greasy.