Can Microsoft’s latest Zune, the Zune HD, take down the king? It depends on which king you’re talking about. As it stands, the iPod Touch is a whole different beast because of the App Store. What Microsoft has done with the Zune HD is nothing short of spectacular, but who is it really competing with? My BlackBerry can play videos and show me pictures taken on a recent trip. The HTC Hero and/or myTouch 3G can stream music from the likes of last.fm or Slacker. I can download MP3s from my iPhone. Everything the Zune HD does, I’ve been able to do with a slew of different devices that I already own.

You see, the features that the Zune team has been touting don’t interest me much. I don’t really care to see an artist’s bio, their pictures or anything of that nature. Sure, the modified IE browser is nice and works great, but I want to know how deeply integrated the Zune HD is going to be with other Microsoft devices like the Xbox 360. I don’t need to fork over extra cash for an HD dock to stream 720p content onto my TV. I can already do that through my Xbox 360, FiOS and whatever content is stored on my NAS. Tell me what the plans are for the next six months. Tell me when the damn thing is actually going to launch.

With that being said, please enjoy the short video that I took of the Zune HD in action. One thing I failed to capture was the on-screen keyboard. MS has taken a different twist, which may or may not be unique to the Zune HD, but it’s different than most other on-screen keyboards that I’ve seen. Unlike the iPhone (or any other device that lacks a physical keyboard) when you’re tapping away at the Zune HD’s on-screen keyboard; characters don’t pop up by themselves. Tap a character and its neighboring chums to the right and left will create a small arch with the center character popping up just a little more than the rest. It seemed to work well, but the firmware isn’t final so I’m unable to fully comment.

Image courtesy of Ben Patterson

“Intro” by The xx

The only other misstep I noticed was with the home button and Internet browser. When you’re navigating through every other feature of the Zune HD, a single tap of the home button brings you back to the main page, but when tapping the home button from within the browser it chorks hard. It takes two or three taps to get back to the home screen. But, again, the Zune HD I took a look at was definitely not final in any way. Also, the Wi-Fi at our meeting location was spotty.

Things are looking good for Microsoft and the Zune team with the HD, but I’m still waiting to hear what they have in store for the device because everything else is old hat.

Discussing MSN emoticons should probably start with understanding what emoticons or smileys are. The necessity to render emotions in written words while still keeping the style casual led to the appearance of smileys or emoticons that are simple combinations of regular keyboard characters. They are popular for different computer communication forms, such as: email and instant messages. Smiling symbols were first introduced as MSN emoticons but they are available on Yahoo! too for instance. The smiling faces function a substitute for the face-to-face casual encouraging smile, but lots of other things can be implied depending on the context.

msn messenger emoticons

Since many people tend to use these signs while communicating via the Internet, MSN, Yahoo, and Google, too, provide you with lists of emoticons, which are converted to real icons while used during a chat session. These emoticons graphically express an emotion through an icon. And here we have an explanation for the name emoticon. Whether MSN emoticons or symbols belonging to another provider, they truly make online communication more pleasant. The whole point or purpose for their use is to convey or stress out emotions and feelings in the funniest way.

msn emoticon

There is no apparent difference in meaning between emoticons and smileys The tendency seems to be for the Europeans to use the term emoticons, while Americans tend to call the same things smileys. Anyway, regular messenger users often call them Yahoo smileys, MSN smileys or MSN emoticons. Lots of sites now provide the chance to download such free symbols and have them within reach when in an online conversation.

MSN messenger gives its users some free emoticons but it also allows you to use your own custom MSN emoticons. Many of these, which are really great, have been designed for messenger by fans. The custom MSN emoticons function allows an Internet surfer to use animated emoticons up to 50×50 pixels in size. At My Emoticons, for instance, all sorts of categories are available for the MSN emoticons, and romance, bad boys, girlie or moody instances are just a few examples. You’ll even find adult emoticons and sex smiles that can make a message or email pretty spicy.

msn emoticons

Each MSN emoticon has a tag, which automatically generates a particular item. Type a colon and a right hand bracket and you’ll get a smiley. Using the opposite bracket will give you a sad face. Many other emoticons also have tags that resemble them, and a constant Internet user can learn them quickly. For the more difficult to remember, use the drop down menu included in the chat window. Like this, MSN emoticons will be just a click away.