Microsoft to launch new Zune models in U.S., Europe

Europeans left waiting in the cold for a functionally-crippled music player will have to wait no longer: Microsoft has announced that the Zune will hit European shores by the end of the year, with "more devices, more features" to boot. The only new version of the Zune that we can confirm at this point is a flash-based version of the media player, which is expected to compete with Apple's iPod Nano in the low end of the market. Other rumored new features are as follows: a Zune music store that allows the downloading of tracks either over a WiFi connection or at a retail "filling station," fully-enabled WiFi sharing of subscription tracks and a mobile version of IE that would allow web surfing over WiFi. While all of these features sound neat, more than a few of them seem unlikely given Microsoft's history of bowing to record industry demands.

For more visions of the coming Zune:
- see this Ars Technica article