A Zune has finally been spotted on the loose and as usual the guys at Gizmodo have the scoop. Seems they have a real tipster on the inside willing to take a risk. The new Microsoft Zune pictures are black and white picture because Microsoft is using a special color code for each player in testing to determine where the slip comes from.

The picture shows what many are calling the center scroll wheel. It is in fact just four buttons shaped round. The up and down buttons will scroll through the menu faster the longer you hold it down. Whatever it’s not a copy of the iPod wheel mouse as many claimed it would be.

The ear bud headsets offer a cool new feature to the Zune with magnets that help keep them together. It seems there may be magnet on the case to help hold them against it as well. The magnet may also aid in mounting a skin or plastic case. Some seem concerned about the magnets interfering with the hard drives but we’re certain this has been tested and accounted for. The magnets don’t need to be very strong to work.

The Zune will be a video and music player and offer FM support by way of an FM transmitter and tuner. The transmitter feeds up Song and Artist information and also ties in with auto systems such as those found in GM cars.

Big news is the Zune video screen working in landscape mode for better movie playback. This could work well for future downloading of widescreen formatted movies from your DVD collection for some cool mobile video play. The Zune features Album Art playback in full screen mode with a trackbar at the bottom that shows a battery level indicator. The Zune features a simple User Interface (UI) and is very similar to the Apple except the colors are reveres ed. The Zune UI sports a black background with white text. While scrolling through your music catalog the screen superimposes the current alphabet letter over the right side of the song list to let you know quickly how far you’ve moved.

It looks like you can use the Zune Wi-fi feature to share music with other Zune owners for a day, giving them the opportunity to buy the tracks themselves from the Zune music store. You should also be able to play Zune music on a Wi-Fi enabled Xbox 360, but this requires a $100 wireless adapter and the $300-400 Xbox console which many of us already have anyway. The Zune is said to be a little larger than a standard iPod and of course it offers a much larger video screen suitable for quality movie playback. We think things are looking good for the Zune and we’re happy with the latest leaked features.

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