> Zune was probably a better player.

In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play.

By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.

IIRC the Zune had a much better DAC on the device than any ipod. I own two of them and the sound quality was always notably great.