I have just read this post by Paul Thurott who says that all Zunes, other than the Zune HD, have been discontinued and that if you want to buy any of the older models you will need to do so soon. I have to say that I am slightly surprised as it means Microsoft could miss out a large part of the market where people just want to play music on a device and don’t need it to go on the internet or run application. There is also the price factor of the device as the alterative Zunes would have been cheaper when on sale along side the HD.

However I can see why Microsoft would remove the other Zunes from the market as it means there is one single type of device for developers to write applications for and not have to worry about the screen type (touch or not), the kind of interaction the user would have with the device. It might also be that design costs would have been prohibitive for the lower models to be as powerful as the HD and so wouldn’t have been able to run the same software and so splintering the whole Zune experience for users.

I would hope that with only a single device on the market Microsoft and its teams will be able to get more strongly behind it than they have been before to give a real presence on the market and really push the device as a competitor to the iPod.

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