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Today has been a pretty good day for Zuners world wide. There's been a lot of exciting rumors and announcements floating around in the blogosphere. To top it all off, the Zune 2.5 update is confirmed to come very soon. According to Max Zuckerman from Channel 8, the latest update will "take a big step
forward in the "social" experience particularly. The improvements can
be seen throughout the web, the local client, and the device itself." The main features added include:
- The ability to transfer a friend's Zune Card
to your device which will keep an up to date list of that friend's most
recently played songs, favorites, and top plays. If you have a Zune Pass,
then you will be able to play the songs from your client and they will
automatically be synced to your device. Best of all, it will keep this
list updated so you can think of this as an automatic DJ playing your
friend's tunes for you.....
- Video store to download and take TV shows etc. on the go
- Client/Player
enhancements like creating autoplaylists, no gaps in the playback,
multiple Zune sync, and easier editing of track information
- Video store, $2 per download. 4,800 music
videos and downloadable TV episodes, partnered with NBC, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Adult Swim, Anime, MTV, MTV2, VH1, BET, Ultimate Fighting, and Cartoon Network as of now.
Update: The update will be out tomorrow! Lots more juicy info after the jump. 
More pictures and details after the jump!
More words from Max:
Some really cool
scenarios come to mind with these new features. For example, my best
friend Nick and I have similar taste in music but he is usually a
little faster at finding the good stuff. If I just sync his Zune Card,
I am all set to get the best and latest music that I have a much better
chance of liking than if I try to find just the overall top 40 songs
from the radio.
There are even going to be "super" friends that you can add--which
won't take up one of your 100 maximum friend slots--that will be
experts at choosing music based on certain genres. I'm imagining it
like a radio station on-the-go, but will have to try it to find out.
The video you see is the new TV ad that is about to hit airwaves...
I like it much better than other Microsoft TV ads (can you say "the
'wow' starts now??").
Some screen shots:
Now
you can see more social information directly in the Zune client... And
yes, that's a "friends of friend" row at the bottom for you to further
explore
The "autoplaylist" feature helps quickly put togther music based on artists, genres, etc.
The video section will have some of your favorite shows like "The Office" or "Heroes."
 There's not much information on the firmware update on the device itself, but is clearly confirmed here. We are confident that this will be both a software AND device update, as Max has already stated. Almost certainly sure, however, XNA games will not make it on to this update. Update: Apparently, Zune.net will be down for maintenance tonight. The updates may be coming out much earlier than we've thought. Update 2: Gizmodo has got the goods! More features:
• Dynamic friends' list that shows what everyone's listening to. Find out about the band Tokyo Police Club from your buddies.
• Windows Live Messenger "now playing" integration
• Album reviews! Tell everyone what you think about so-and-so's latest album, because the world needs to know. But the big thing is the video store, which comes now with 4,800 music
videos and downloadable TV episodes for $2. Their current partners are
NBC, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Cartoon Network. There's going to
be future Zune Social integration for video, but nothing yet.
Microsoft's also leaving the door open for original content and
programming as well, but there's no video sharing/squirting as of yet
on the hardware devices.
The update should go live somewhere between 10PM PDT and 4AM PDT tomorrow. Edit By Mitch:
Here is the upcoming Zune Pass Commercial, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dC199kSBhE
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Games?
h
Thank you MS, you're starting to come around.
