Microsoft ditches Zune hardware

It won’t be a shock to hear that Microsoft has admitted that it has ceased production of Zune hardware.

The Zune brand will live on, however, as the face of much of Microsoft’s content sales service. It can still be found, for instance, on the Xbox dashboard as the branding behind its film and music services.

We recently announced that, going forward, Windows Phone will be the focus of our mobile music and video strategy, and that we will no longer be producing Zune players,” an official statement read.

So what does this mean for our current Zune users? Absolutely nothing. Your device will continue to work with Zune services just as it does today. And we will continue to honour the warranties of all devices for both current owners and those who buy our very last devices. Customer service has been, and will remain a top priority for us.”

The first Zune device was launched in 2006 and spanned several generations until the most recent Zune HD device, which itself was shown to be a capable gaming device.

The range never made it outside of the US and Canada, however.

However, the advent of Windows Phone 7 and the immense marketing push behind it meant that the struggling Zune, which had consistently fallen flat in the face of both superior media devices (iPod Touch) and smartphones (iPhone, Android).