Even tough the battery performance improved after the November 13th update, some users notably zune 30/80 GB users were complaining of battery drain when they suspend their zune hard drives by holding down the play/pause button.

Well there is a good news from Cesar the recent 2.3 firmware update puts an end to this problem and also provides some performance improvements like

Improved device recognition

(and)

Improved stability and reliability on sync (both wirelessly and while connected to a PC).

Hopefully after this update we will not hear any more issues related to batteries.

Its 13th today and we have been eagerly waiting for a series of updates including the zune software, marketplace, zune social and more importantly the firmware update 2.2.

The update is now available for download here. A member of zunethoughts team has also detailed his upgrade experience in the video below.

Here is the word from Cesar on new zunes battery life with the wireless turned off.

Zune 4GB and Zune 8GB
Audio: up to 24 hours
Video: up to 4 hours
Tested Using: 128kbps .wma tracks

Zune 80
Audio: up to 30 hours
Video: up to 4 hours
Tested Using: 500kbps .wmv videos

A couple of day’s back I wrote a post confirming the release of new zunes. Now I’d briefly list the features of new zunes and keep updating it as we discover more or hear from the zune team.

List of features:

• First of all no clock. Well a lot of people expected it to be in the first place when zune was launched
• No portable hard drive support.
• Support Podcasts.
• Resolution of 720×480 @30fps or 720×576 @25fps without transcoding.
• 640×480 TV out or video out resolution without transcoding.

Microsoft has confirmed that they will be releasing the new Zunes: 4GB, 8GB and 80GB model on November 13th exactly a month and 10 days from now. Amazon has already listed them for preorder. They will continue to retail the first gen zune (i.e. the 30GB model) for $199.99 and will release a firmware update 2.1 to make it backward compatible, that means you will automatically get the new features through this update. I guess the only difference will be the new design with a sleek touch sensitive button called zune pad for browsing.

Specifications: