Zunited posted yesterday an article about a recent post by James Gunn, a movie director, who had been invited to “The Microsoft Experience” which is a showcase event for people in the media of Microsoft’s latest and greatest gadgets. From the sounds of it all the demos at this event were of unreleased products and in some cases unannounced.

James Gunn writes that he saw a “touchscreen counter”, which I assume to be Surface as it cost $30000, which he reckons beats the iPad comfortably. He played with some 3D systems and Age of Empires 3 in 3D, it sounds like its not just Hollywood and TV companies thinking 3D is the way forward. It would appear though that the main thing he wanted to play with was Project Natal for Xbox which he seems to like a lot which sounds like every one who has tried out the innovative hands free controller.

Now on to the interesting stuff.

Some of the other stuff – the new Zune, the upcoming Microsoft phone, also looked fantastic.  But, admittedly, I’m going to have a hard time getting out of my 20,000 songs on iTunes to actually switch over to Zune – and I feel stuck to the iPhone because of the apps.  I also saw a new Microsoft tablet which is a lot like the iPad.

The “new Zune” is perhaps the most interesting piece of info as there has been little talk about a new Zune HD thus far. It could just be that this device was the 64GB version of the Zune HD, however it sounds like he was shown only unreleased products at the event and with the 64GB version in stores it is unlikely to the device. I expect Microsoft are planning to release a new Zune HD device around about September time, like last year, but I am surprised that it would be shown to anyone this far in advance.

There were a few rumours a couple of months back about the Zune HD 2 using Tegra 2, not something I am inclined to believe as there would perhaps be a little too much power in a portable media player and it would be a drain on the battery life. I think it also likely that the Zune HD 2 will have a phone-less variant of Windows Phone 7 running on it, after all Microsoft sure don’t want to support 4 or more mobile platforms, and with Windows Phone 7 likely to appear in September I can see this as the date for the next Zune device too.

It also sounds like Microsoft have again demoed the HP Slate, I am not inclined to think this is the Courier as it is described as being like the iPad; images leaked yesterday of the slate PC.

It would be interesting to know if it was the Zune HD 2 demoed at this event after all it was about this last year that the first images of the Zune HD started showing up on the internet, but I guess we will just have to wait to see if there is a new device on the horizon.