Solo Technology

We gave my daughter a 30GB Zune for Christmas. We spotted it on Woot.com back in September — smoking deal, was under $90 for a refurbished brown. Well, they oversold those so we got bumped up to a refurb’d black along with the fancy-schmancy accessory kit (nicer headphones, a case, a wall charger, etc). Pretty sweet deal and nice customer service from the Woot folks.

Originally it was going to be mine, but just before it showed up I got my HTC Mogul phone… I figured I could use the phone for my mp3 needs so we showed it to the girl. She’s wanted more storage and immediately fell in love with the idea of having 30GB of storage and video, so we stored it away until last week. It was amazing how quickly she was ready to toss her iPod under the bus.

Ya know? The thing is pretty slick. From what I saw I of it, I liked it. Putting videos and such on it was pretty cool and the interface seemed useable. However, after 4 days of use by a teenage girl, it appears to now be bricked.

(sorry for pic quality…) Seriously, isn’t that the lamest error screen you could imagine on a consumer device? Contact Support?!? How about a frickin’ URL or phone number or (dare I say) instructions on how to soft reset? I mean really — how about something useful on the screen instead? Who thought putting that screen in front of their target audience was a good idea?

So yeah: A goofy logo, the number 5 in a circle and “Contact support” helpfully displayed in 3 languages is what we get. I’ve done some searches for issue resolution and the general consensus is to completely reset. Not a bad idea, I wanted to flash it to the new Zune software anyways…

If only I could get it to fully reset though! I can get it to soft-reset (back button + up). Once that starts, you’re supposed to immediately do the finger-tangler of back button + left + center button. No matter how many different ways I try, nothing happens.

I completely drained the battery. No difference. As near as I can tell, there’s not a way to pull the battery either.

I guess we’ll see if we can exchange it somehow, unless I can find a surefire way to reset it. Bummer.

7 Responses to “Zune Angst”

1. Peter on January 1st, 2008 12:23 pm
   

   Wow, that is a pretty terrible error screen. Will the full reset clear all the music off the device too?

2. Chris Kasten on January 1st, 2008 1:07 pm
   

   Yep, the full reset will clear everything. I still can’t seem to get it to that point though.

3. Nathan on January 1st, 2008 7:51 pm
   

   Sounds like they didn’t fix the original problem in the refurb process

4. Chris Kasten on January 2nd, 2008 4:50 pm
   

   Nathan, I suspect you’re spot on.

   Woot tells us to contact Microsoft since our unit has a 1 year warranty. This ought to be exciting…

5. » pingback » Return of the Zune » Solo Technology on February 5th, 2008 5:45 pm
   
   
6. daniel on April 18th, 2008 5:03 pm
   

   haha
   mine is doing the same thing, it started with a 1 in a circle, i did all the steps and now it says “contact support”

7. Chris on April 18th, 2008 6:43 pm
   

   If it helps, since we got it back it has been flawless. My daughter loves it.

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