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I had some time to talk with Cesar Menendez from Zune Insider today. Here is what he had to say to some the hot questions a lot of us want to know about. Unfortunately, he had to throw the famous, “we don’t comment on rumors and speculation” answer out there some, but hey… We all understand.

Q. Hello Cesar, Most of us in the Zune Community are already fully aware of who you are and all the great things you’ve done for Zune, for those that don’t know, tell us a bit about yourself. ( You don’t have to mention you just turned 29, I just did…)

Well my zune tag is cesarisok, and I manage zuneinsider.com. Before that I worked on the xbox community team J

Q. I realize that you aren’t at liberty to discuss the future, but I have to ask right off the bat, Have you seen the GotZune Color Poll?  Will we see a blue Zune 80 any time zune(soon)?

Ya you nailed it when you said “aren’t at liberty to discuss the future” (aka my favorite line – “we don’t comment on rumors and speculation” ).

Q. On to the Social. How are the Zune.net forums panning out for you? Is the activity level up or down from what you guys expected? I personally enjoy trying to help folks there, but there are a lot of trolls…

The activity is actually right where we expected, I would say. There’s a lot of things I like about the forums: that users have a place to express themselves and so as the zune team, we see the good, the bad and the ugly. And lots of folks on the Zune team are in the forums, answering user questions and helping folks out. Best of all, folks in the community are connecting, whether about the software, the device, or about music.  Sure there are trolls, but I think the community is pretty good at identifying and dismissing those folks – hint: when someone has 0 plays, 0 friends, it could be a red flag ;).

Q. A couple quickies about Hardware and Features. Can you, or will you please comment on why a) the Smart Playlists and the EQ were removed from the 2.2 firmware?

We actually built the Zune software, the Zune device, and the Zune social from the ground up this year and prioritized other features over smart playlists for the November release.  As for EQ, it’s actually a hardware thing, not a firmware thing. Zune 30 GB still has the EQ settings. In the 2007 lineup (Zune 80, 4, and 8 GB), the engineering teams made the choice to not include eq settings for a few reasons. I know that the dev teams went to great lengths to ensure we have extensive work in optimizing and tuning the audio signal path of the device to ensure that highest fidelity and quality of sound was reproduced in the headphones and the docking station. As one of our lead engineers puts it “we have good ohms.” So I think we’ve actually made some significant improvements in our audio quality – the engineering tweaks go a long way, not to mention the inclusion of premium headphones on Zune 80 and additional support for wma lossless for the whole device family.

Q. What about the ability to use the Zune as an external hard drive. I know there is a hack to allow it to work as such, but why is this not supported natively? That is such a good feature that a lot of HD based players have. I would really like to see it on the Zune.

I think it comes down to focus – we wanted to make sure that we nail some core music experiences for folks and to give folks a new way to connect and discover music via their friends. That said, we’re definitely looking at community feedback for future stuff (although I’m not talking about future stuff right now).

Q. Speaking of hard drives. Is there any plans to possibly use the solid state drives in future Zunes?  Oops, I couldn’t help asking another “Future” question.

Heh, you’re killin me with the future questions ;). 

Q. Thanks for your time and I want to thank you and the entire Zune Team for all you guys are doing up there in Redmond. Anything else you’d like to share with the GotZune Folks?

Hit me up in the zune social! I love getting songs sent to me.

Thanks Cesar for the time to answer these… Think Blue on future models!