The rumor mill started churning information about a possible upgrade of the Zune MP3 player line crafted at Redmond, after some pictures with Zunes running firmware version 2.1 were leaked on the Web.

Gadget-focused blog Engadget published the first pictures of what appears to be a first generation Zune running firmware 2.1, and the site explained that the official release of this update is slated for Wednesday, October 3. However, Zune owners that posted replies on the site have said that they were already in possession of the new software…

Rumors about a second generation of Zunes have been circulating since early July, when the first details about the alleged Draco and Scorpio MP3 players emerged. The Draco Zunes are supposed to be 4GB and 8GB Flash-based gadgets with video playback capabilities and WiFi. The Scorpio Zune should have an 80GB hard-drive, but that would be no match for the current generation of iPods.

After experiencing some cable problems in the production phase, the next generation of Zunes is apparently on its way to stores’ shelves, if we are to believe what zunescene.com says. The transcript of a phone conversation that someone at Zunescene had with an insider at Redmond confirms that today we’ll have the new Zune 2.0 officially presented (is it an October 2-Zune 2 coincidence?...) and that the launch date is targeted for October 16. The official presentation will apparently take place at Microsoft’s headquarters and will be honored by company founder Bill Gates and J Allard, Corporate Vice President and the Chief XNA Architect at Microsoft. Unfortunately for Zune fans, the inside source confirms that only an 80GB Zune is currently in PV (production validation) phase, the craved 160GB model remaining just a promise for the future. According to the transcript of the phone interview, the Zune 2.0 Scorpio “looks like the original” but sports a “squircle”, the control button that now takes the form of “a square or polygon with rounded edges, it's not a  perfect circle.”

There are a few strong points to believe these rumors. First of all, it’s the example set at the beginning of last month by Apple, whose next-gen iPods got leaked on the Web before the famous 5th of September San Francisco event, where the mind-boggling price cut for the iPod was announced. The pictures posted on different sites before the event revealed the upcoming iPod Touch and the new iPod Nano. The same could happen to Zune 2.0 too.

There is also the price cut operated for the Zune a day before the launch of the new iPods- and any price cut usually indicates that a new, enhanced product is ready to debut.

My personal opinion is that Microsoft is indeed readying the Zunes depicted in the picture you see on the upper left corner for launch, but hopefully we’ll have more details in just a few hours…