I have way too much time on my hands to think about things lately and that sometimes leads to some dangerous situations. I’ve been thinking about the Zune and how it interacts with the XBox 360…seriously, I have no idea why I even care about this but just hang with me here.

Obviously, Microsoft wants to sell Zunes AND 360s. Let me just cut to the chase and say that Microsoft should create an XBox 360 SKU that comes with an 80GB Zune and a dock where the existing hard drive is on the XBox. The Zune then becomes your 360’s hard drive. Sure you lose space on the Zune that could be holding music or video files but I think the seamless integration would trump the mixed use of the Zune’s storage space. I also just read a rumor about a 120GB Zune on the horizon so this is becoming even less of an issue.

Think of where this could go for Microsoft. They could sell just the Zune docking station to fit in the 360’s hard drive bay. They could sell more Zunes because now people actually have a reason to own one. You could take your XBLA games with you to a friends house and listen to music on the way on the same device. The games you download on XBLA or buy on disc could have miniature Zune games that install automatically to your media player and add value to other games you play…much like pub games will do in Fable 2. The movies you rent over Live would already be on the Zune so you could watch them on the go or at home. As long as the movie offerings stay at DVD quality storage space shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

If your still not convinced, here are a few numbers. A new 120GB hard drive for the 360 currently goes for $180 on Amazon. The 80GB Zune is selling for $240. I know the hard drives are overpriced but even if they cut the price of the hard drives to something reasonable all you are getting is a 2.5” drive in a proprietary case. Why not buy something useful like an MP3 player that can serve multiple purposes?

I think Microsoft is missing out big-time by not integrating these devices more closely then they already have. I’m sure there are issues with drive speeds at the smaller sizes but I know that 1.8” drives are getting faster. With such a small platter so densely packed with data these drives can read more data per rotation and that should make rotation speed less of an issue in the future.

Just an additional note, I find it intriguing that I can be so good at Photoshop and so horrible at using the Gimp. If anybody wants to make a better mock-up than the one I posted above just send it to me and I’ll post it with some credits.