Don't have anything nice to say? Review Microsoft's Zune MP3 player, released Tuesday. At least that seems to be the blogosphere's general rule as Microsoft's bid for cool gets a frosty reception. Engadget doesn't mince words: Installing the Zune, "sucked", causing the reviewer's top-of-the-line Media Center PC to crash several times. It then took the critic another 20 minutes to load the program on another PC. That's not all Engadget griped about: The registration process was arbitrarily complex, requiring too much personal information and demanding that the user create both a Zune "tag" and a Windows Live ID.

Apple Matters - obviously, not the most objective of sources - deftly rips apart the absurd complexity of Zune Marketplace's pricing, which requires users to buy Microsoft "Points" - about 1.25 cents apiece - and then convert prices from Points to dollars. Maybe math comes easy to Redmond residents with computer-science degrees, but what were they thinking? People struggle to calculate tips on dinner!

Gizmodo's Brian Lam says the brown Zune looks like "swamp water Jell-O." Ouch! Tech blogger Siddiq Bello also mentions the brown color - one of three options - as one of 10 reasons the Zune will flop.

Digg readers, meanwhile, went for the jugular and openly mocked the photos that appear throughout the Zune software-installation process. Asks one, presumably rhetorically: "I'm assuming by the photos of the hipsters on the install screens that the Zune is meant to be used almost exclusively by white kids in their early 20s with MTV-approved haircuts?"