Was just over at Crunchgear and caught this, (think it was just posted).

Microsoft-Zune-Price-DropLooks like Microsoft is up to its sneaky tricks, the price of the Zune will be dropped to $199 tomorrow (Sept 5th). Just in time for all the Apple announcements. Rumors has been floating around for about a week or longer that Apple will announce updates to pretty much the whole iPod line. If you looked pretty closely at the news, you’d also notice that there are hints about that there will be a Zune 2 announced soon also.

I think the Zune price drop announcement is probably Microsoft’s attempt to compete with the iPod announcements but if you check over at the Zune insider (where the price drop is announced) this is what was said.

Some of you may have already heard, but tomorrow we’re dropping the suggested retail price for Zune to $199.  It’s part of the normal product lifecycle, something we’ve had on the books for months.  We just got some research back and customer satisfaction with the 30GB device is really high (around 94%) and we expect even more consumers will now want to discover the Zune experience at the new lower price.

 

Honestly, I think the Zune is a pretty fine player, coming from a spectators point of view since Ive never actually played around with it. But of coarse, Microsoft gets no respect. It will take about 2 or 3 iterations of the device before people really start to take it seriously.

If you check Amazon, the 30gb Zune is already listed at $199, so buy up