A few folks have noticed that the album art on Zune Marketplace looks better, both on the PC and on your Zune. It's true. Last Tuesday, we started featuring 800x800 album art available for download, and for sync with the Zune device. In addition, ripped CDs will have 240x240 art available where available, and this should also be synced to the device. We actually released this last week, but I haven't had a chance to look at it until now - my bad!

Our friends in the 'rama forums have been following the Top 20 Most Wanted Rankings on CNet for the past few weeks, as have our friends at 'scene . This week, Zune tops the most wanted list, beating out the Nintendo Wii. Cool. As usual, the normal caveats apply - just like the Amazon sales ranking, the CNet ranking is a good picture of how Zune is tracking - but only among the registered users on CNet.com. Overall, a good step for Zune, though.

Today we're announcing the retail availability of new accessories for Zune, both first and third party. You can get the full press release here , but I'll just sum up the high points: We're working directly with 23 accessory partners. The list of licensed Zune accessory partners: Agent 18, Altec Lansing Technologies Inc., Belkin International Inc., Case-mate, Digital Lifestyle Outfitters (DLO), Directed Electronics Inc. (Polk Audio), Digital Products International Inc., Dual Electronics Corp., GPX...

Lots of folks have asked me “hey, what happened to the double-shot ?” Short answer: we still have a double-shot, but this year’s implementation is different from last year’s. For the long answer, I checked with our design team - here’s what I heard back from Steve Kaneko , our design director. Here’s what he told me: We have maintained the double-shot plastic for this year’s devices. The surprise this year is that we used a light inside color and a tinted outside shot that carries the hue. The effect...