Neowin "Confirms" Zune Will Go International This Year

"After doing some digging, we can confirm that the release this fall will be international . While we were not able to get a list of countries that the Zune will ship to, we can confirm that it will be shipping to: Australia, China, and Europe. A company representative told me that there will be far more countries that the Zune will be shipping to. Stay tuned for more, including specs and pictures (We've seen the internal video!). I'll leave our readers with this: It's slim and you won't need a D-Pad. Feel free to speculate."

We pretty much knew that new hardware was coming this year, but the interwebs are blowing up over a single tweet from Brian Seitz where he confirmed that there's new hardware in the pipeline. People seem pretty excited about a new Zune, so that's good to see. The above quote from this Neowin article has more specifics than I've seen elsewhere - though I disagree with the use of "confirm" when they can't quote their source. At any rate, if this news is accurate, I'd say it's very big news indeed. Not only does it seem to firm up the rumour about an iPod Touch-like Zune (slim and no D-Pad), but it seems the Zune is finally ready to bust out of the confines of North America. Take this all with a large grain of salt mind you, because none of this is confirmed, but I think it's worth getting excited about! I wish I could add my own speculation into the mix based on what I learned spending two days with the Zune team, but I can't...I do hope though to be among the first to be able to provide you all with accurate information when the time comes.