"At CES 2006, Microsoft announced version 11 of Windows Media Player (WMP) and garnered a Best of CES nomination for its efforts. Most of the buzz at the trade show surrounded Microsoft's partnership with MTV and its Urge music service, but we're most excited about WMP's new, very visually appealing look and feel. Besides, Microsoft's reps had to defer to MTV for most Urge-related queries, so we didn't learn much about the service. What we did learn in our meeting is that anyone running Windows XP or Vista will definitely want the latest version of WMP when it becomes available (we're putting our bets on Q3 of this year)." The team at Microsoft has been paying attention to iTunes and made some big changes for the latest version of Windows Media Player. Based on their first look, it appears to be more than eye candy as performance has been greatly improved as well.