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.

Well this is great news for Halo fans. Microsoft will be releasing a limited edition of Halo3 – Zune. This edition will be exclusively available through GameStop beginning this June 15th. You can pre-order here.

The Zune - Halo 3 Edition comes:

• Pre-loaded with music, artwork (over 120 different images), trailers and videos from Halo, Halo 2, and Halo 3
• Custom Halo graphics
• Special edition, customized packaging
• Exclusive episode of Red vs. Blue (only the first six episodes of season 1)

It looks great, see for yourself in the un-boxing video below.

Alright finally we have something to write about which is not a rumor. It’s confirmed and definitely not about the zune phone, or the zune 2.0 or the Flash zune or regarding the Wi-Fi sharing of songs running firmware version 2.1.4 etc.

Microsoft will be manufacturing its own zunes in China, wait a minute isn’t zune from MS? Yes, but its build by Toshiba which is re-badged and repackaged and slapped with the Microsoft logo. So, will MS have any advantage?

The much awaited software update 1.3 is out now. As of 10:00 AM PT yesterday the update is available for download.

Well as I mentioned before, the update includes known bug fixes. For example skipping issue with zune marketplace content, improved device, syncing and software reliability. And a few changes to the FM tuner which prevents the battery from draining in sleep mode.

Now let’s move on to feedback. I just searched around a few blogs and sites to see if this update really helped in fixing the bugs as claimed by Microsoft.

Here are a couple of responses:

We all know that zune software does not recognize and transcode DivX, XViD, and MPEG files with .AVI extensions. But there is a work around to this problem.

A zunescene forum member devised a hack; well not actually a hack, but registry tweaks which will enable the zune software to recognize and convert DivX files.

After making changes to the registry you can now drag and drop DivX files into the software. These files will be automatically transcoded to the native WMV format when you sync your zune.

Remember, this hack doesn’t add native DivX support to the software or zune itself.