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:

This news is from a credible source, Cesar from Zuneinsider confirmed on his blog that the new retail price for Zune would be $199.

He said they having been thinking about doing this for a while as around 94% of people polled found the price to be on the higher side.

Now with the new price more people would enjoy the Zune experience. On the other hand we still don’t have any information on the new Zune or any new updates.