As the summer marches towards its inevitable conclusion and the release date of the Zune HD inches ever closer (rumored to be in early September), one item of business that Microsoft has been awfully mum about is the status of firmware upgrades for the current crop of Zunes. Microsoft has been really good to its Zune users (imagine that) with regards to upgrades; in fact, early adopters have been downright spoiled, receiving free firmware updates through the current 3.x series. That is all, of course, a good thing.

But the problem now becomes: what is the expectation on the upcoming 4.0 firmware release? The Zune HD is an entirely different beast, its UI obviously optimized for the touch experience. How difficult would it be to transfer this UI to the current batch of Zunes? In theory, given the buttons and Zune Pad, the interface should be able to be navigated without too much tweaking under the hood. But the HD is also running Tegra at its core; what kind of performance difference are we going to see if the UI is translated to run on current Zunes?

Aside from performance, how about features? Can users really expect the web browser to be added to current Zunes? Would you even want that experience given the control scheme? Or any new Marketplace features? Video features?

Then this brings us to a hard question: do the Zune 30's receive this upgrade? Would it be reasonable to expect Microsoft to continue to support the Zune 30 into the 4.x firmware range? At what point do they draw the line and cut off the first generation?

A lot of questions, and still some time before they need to be answered. But the important thing you, as a Zune user, needs to start doing is managing your expectations. I would be surprised if Microsoft was able to please everyone in this go-around. Maybe they'll pull off yet another surprise. But I think that well has been visited one too many times.