Obama uses Zune. Will iPod fans demand apology?

Posted by Eric Benderoff at 5:25 p.m.

Here’s what we know about President-elect Barack Obama and gadgets:

He loves his BlackBerry. He’s a Mac, not a PC. He was seen working out with a Zune.

Wait...a Zune? Not an iPod? Is it too late for a recount?

Obama’s alleged choice of digital music player has sparked so much buzz in the techie blogosphere that all the incoming traffic briefly crashed the Web site of the Philadelphia paper that broke the story.

“We didn’t anticipate this kind of attention,” said Drew Lazor, the online editor for Citypaper.net.

Obama’s Zune “was a rather innocuous comment in the original piece,” Lazor said of the story by Neal Santos, who spotted the Zune while he worked out Tuesday at the same gym as the president-elect. A tech blogger picked up the Zune mention—in the fourth paragraph, can you say bury the lead?—“and it kind of exploded from there,” Lazor said.

Microsoft’s Zune has just a few percentage points of the digital player market, compared to the 70-percent plus share held by iPod and many techies consider it a weak imitation of Apple's music player. (Full disclosure: I have favorably reviewed, and like, both players.)

Fans of the iPod don't believe Santos account and demand proof of what they consider betrayal by the president-elect, who is known to use that brand. Santos responded in a second post: “I’ve seen a Zune in action. I know what it looks like.”

An Obama spokeswoman confirmed he typically uses an iPod and said she didn’t know where the Zune came from.

Meanwhile, posters at the blog Zune Thoughts have been crowing about the possibility of a presidential convert.

But perhaps this comment from Gizmodo poster berribrand sums it up best: “Uhm hello. He IS the candidate for CHANGE.”