Zune owners lighted up online forums and blogs with their testaments of ire and frustration, some threatening to switch to the iPod if the issue was not remedied. Zapien was one, but he perked up upon hearing that the glitch was temporary.
"I was starting to worry about whether I'd have to switch to an iPod," he said.
Microsoft said that it has sold 3 million Zunes since introducing the device in November 2006, but that the leap-year problem affected only the unspecified number of models with 30 gigabytes of memory that were manufactured by Toshiba Corp. and discontinued in 2008. Rosoff estimated that there were about 1 million such Zunes in the market.
Microsoft also sells models with 4, 8, 16, 80 and 120 gigabytes of memory.
The Zune seize-ups come on the heels of a hardware malfunction uncovered last year in Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console. That problem was estimated to have cost the company, which is best known for making operating systems and office productivity software, more than $1 billion to fix.
Said Doherty: "From the Xbox 360 recall to the Zune surprise, Microsoft is learning that it's very difficult to be a hardware company."
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alex.pham@latimes.com
