Zune News

USB Your Car

With so many gadgets out there, I wonder why a USB port or two isn’t standard equipment on new cars.  Even if the port doesn’t connect to the car stereo, at least if it provided power, it would be be able to power and charge the device.  I know in my car, my cigarette lighter auxiliary power port gets rotated between my GPS, my radar detector, and my Zune.  Here’s where a product that can add four ports at once can find a place:

It’s not exactly revolutionary in its functionality, converting the 12V input from your car’s cigarette jack into power that can be used by any USB device, but it is certainly breaking new ground by offering four ports. This way, you (almost) have enough ports for each passenger in the car, assuming that each of them has a cell phone, iPod, Zune, or similar device that’s running out of juice. You can even run a USB fan on there if you want.

With Quad USB ports, it gets me wondering what I could pop into the fourth port.  We wouldn’t want it to go to waste, would we?

Zune 3 To Launch “Across the Pond?”

Forget for a moment that the Zune 80, the 2nd gen Zune that’s hardly old, hasn’t launched in Canada yet.  Why?  Because they’re already talking about the Zune 3, and it’s expected to have a simultaneous launch in Europe!  The HT Lounge reports the following:

As we look forward to the 2009 holiday season (yes, we’re looking that far ahead), more news surrounding the third-generation Zune is starting to rise to the surface.

Francois Ruault of Microsoft France is saying that the Zune 3 will be launching in Europe at the same time that it is being released for North America. This should help Microsoft better establish its portable media player in international markets.

No word on what the specs on the Zune 3 will be.  I really think that the improvements need to go into the software more than the Zune device itself, but a larger hard drive wouldn’t be a bad thing.  120 GB anyone?