Microsoft plans to port at least some of its Zune HD apps to Windows Phone. The software giant has not revealed which apps specifically, but it's not too hard to guess. In fact, if you disregard games, you'll see there are only nine apps for the Zune HD: Calculator, Facebook, Messenger, Piano, Shuffle by Album, Stopwatch, Twitter, Weather, Zune Reader. Except for the third one and the last one, they're all rather useless or are already on the Windows Phone platform.
The news comes from episode #119 of the Zune Insider podcast. The relevant part was transcribed and posted first by Anythingbutiphone:
The apps that we have built internally for Zune, we're actually looking at porting those over to Windows Phone. I can"t tell you when or what the exact dates are. But that's something we're definitely looking at.
There has been talk for quite a while now that Microsoft is getting ready to kill off the Zune. The company has been viciously denying rumors that it will clear out inventory of the stock it has, and stop producing more units of the various Zune models. Last month, the software giant slashed the prices for two (out of three) Zune HD models: the 16GB to $170 (from $200) and the 32GB to $200 (from $270). If I wasn't planning on buying a smartphone with at least 16GB of space, I would jump on this deal.
While we haven't heard about any retail store running out of stock yet, the rumor suggesting that Microsoft will kill off the Zune hardware and focus instead on just the software, is a topic that just won't die. Even before this tidbit about Microsoft porting Zune HD apps to Windows Phone, it was clear that the company is increasingly concentrating on the Zune service in Windows Phone over any other form of the Zune brand.