I never had a great respect for Creative’s audio quality, in a sense they are know to have at best ‘above average’ and normally ‘average’ audio quality. None of their audio products has ever reached, forget about over running, the standard set out by the best up there. This new Creative ZEN ... Read review
The simplest way to share your music.The ZEN Stone MP3 player with built-in speaker ... more
makes listening toyour favourite music even more fun. You can choose to share yourtracks using the speaker or to listen using earbuds. Either wayit's so simp
Postage & Packaging: £4.39 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
The simplest way to share your music.The ZEN Stone MP3 player with built-in speaker ... more
makes listening toyour favourite music even more fun. You can choose to share yourtracks using the speaker or to listen using earbuds. Either wayit's so simp
Postage & Packaging: £4.39 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
The simplest way to share your music. The ZEN Stone MP3 player with built-in speaker makes ... more
listening to your favourite music even more fun. You can choose to share your tracks using the speaker or to listen using earbuds. Either way it's so simple! Ava...
Postage & Packaging: £4.39 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
(+) Av Output to plug to a TV, built-in speakers, easy to use. Come with very good earphones (-) Does not come with power supply (easy to charge from the PC though), av cable is sold separately
Advantages: Tiny, FM radio, voice recorder, speaker Disadvantages: Quite some, read the review
...best up there. This new Creative ZEN Stone Plus is no exception only that you get a speaker system, whose sound quality is not more than what you can expect from speaker so tiny, as a bonus and only that.
The Upgrade to Creative Zen Stone plus, keeping the same price tag with upgraded accessories without charges. Providing silicon skin and detachable clip for the skin plus the standard ear-bud, instructions and of course the USB cable. ... ...the root. There is The Creative Media Lite which is totally unnecessary for normal use, the drag and drop does the job just as well. But it is not use less, the Creative Media Lite is required for functions like volume limiting, transferring contents of protected media and updating firmware. Moreover it rips music also but very unsophisticated, “crude” if I may use the word. CD ripping requires dedicated software.
'''INTERFACE''' more
I never had a great respect for Creative’s audio quality, in a sense they are know to have at best ‘above average’ and normally ‘average’ audio quality. None of their audio products has ever reached, forget about over running, the standard set out by the best up there. This new Creative ZEN Stone Plus is no exception only that you get a speaker system, whose sound quality is not more than what you can expect from speaker so tiny, as a bonus and only that.
The Upgrade to Creative Zen Stone plus, keeping the same price tag with upgraded accessories without charges. Providing silicon skin and detachable clip for the skin plus the standard ear-bud, instructions and of course the USB cable. I thought it was an inch from the Shuffle and Clip. The skin is a quality one providing openings for USB cable and the speaker.
The new Zen Stone plus is a look alike of the Zen Stone with Speakers. The one laudable addition is the attractive matte finish, except the front buttons, so less prone to finger prints and scratches only replacing the gloss of its predecessor gaining hardly anything in terms of professionalism that it lacked when it had the glint.
It’s amazing how a company enjoying such high reputation can churn out products of mediocre quality on such regular basis. Is it they have problems with information technology at its crudest form (I mean user feed back, please)? Or is it they have serious R&D problems? May be they are not serious at all about this particular wing? It really makes me wonder!
This stuff, which, in spite of the ravishing matte finish, still looks dumb, is just useful while listening to podcast in the car, the speaker on the back of the Zen Stone Plus makes it worth.
DESIGN
The main controls are on the front of the player but now the play/pause button is right on top (unlike its sibling), logical deviation. The surprising deletion is the physical ‘shuffle mode’ and the play mode is painstakingly accessed ever so slowly using the sluggish menus of the system. There is no ‘hold’ button in spite of its obvious problem it’s preferable.
Still there is a sexy looking 64x64 OLED screening smug up there on the left with a hackneyed blue-on-black display and does what a display of such size is capable of doing. A good implementation of graphic display into such a tiny stuff and the icons are large enough and useful too.
FEATURES:
The new Stone Plus supports, as its sibling, MP3, AAC and WMA files, and claims to play Audible downloads and copy-protected content, though I am very sorry, couldn't get any of Audible's formats to work; neither audiobooks nor subscription downloads would play. Funny though there is no support subsciption support services such as Nepstar but the one bought-to-own from such store plays nice and cool! There is no way to select individual tracks but the library is reshufflable and can visually navigate the album, a big bonus no doubt. One very pleasing feature is the Voice recoder allowing upto 10 hours recording on one go and saved with file names as the recording terminates. These recorded files can dragged and dropped to the PC or browsed usng built-in navigation. The FM radio with 32 presets is another addition and ofcourse the celebrated little speakers are there taking the audio notches higher. But it is insane, these are bound to fall in the hands of early teenagers and imagine a situation in packed bus or any public transport for that matter, I promise those journeys will less ejoyable, although they are hardly enjoyble, will be difficult or even traumatic.
AUDIO PLAYBACK
Nothing much there standard which you are supposed to get. Repeat track, Repeat folder and Repeat All. Then the usual shuffle options.
But there is annoying problem with shuffling for the simple reason the shuffle mode works by creating a shuffled play list and then playing it. What happens when a track is skipped ? Simple, end up with exactly same order of song and a brand new one for each track ! May be there are people who will love this but I will prefer any day the Sansa Clip randomizing.
While deleting there is a problem, you can not delete a whole folder, one track after another. So the option in the playback menu “delete the current play song”. I don’t have time deleting one at a time!
TRANSFERING MEDIA
It works with, I mean it is supposed to, since the Stone Plus Speaker is MSC and mount as removable drive like the flash or pen drive So the usual method of simply copying and pasting wonderfully. Naturally it can work just as simple external storage device. But it will take a hell of a lot of time to fill the baby up full, rate is 1-2MB per second and most of times even more. I mean some times it gets on to my nerve.
SOFTWARE
Go to the folder named “Starter Pack” situated on the root. There is The Creative Media Lite which is totally unnecessary for normal use, the drag and drop does the job just as well. But it is not use less, the Creative Media Lite is required for functions like volume limiting, transferring contents of protected media and updating firmware. Moreover it rips music also but very unsophisticated, “crude” if I may use the word. CD ripping requires dedicated software.
INTERFACE
It carries the legacy of Stone Plus in a sense that the lethargic, laggy and hard to use interface problem has hardly been taken care of. The menu is slow but not that slow but lag is not as much one second, not fast that much is sure. New inclusion in the interface is the speaker option. It is hardly intuitive.
I find the issue of constantly scrolling through the menu annoying, oh my god Scroll “cancel” or press the music icon go to “now playing” get a pause on the music.. I don’t know!! The persistence of scrolling to “cancel” to get out is absolutely boring far better is the “Home” button of Sansa Clip.
Another pointless illogical and annoying feature is the programmable short cut button. Do you switch modes that often? Does any one jump from Music/Radio/ Clock that often to have programmed short cut?
SOUND QUALITY
The equalizer is really a big problem. It sounds hollow flat and the lower frequencies are real bad, meaning the bass it poor. The equalization issue is based handled by Sony because the Sanasa Clip also has the same problem. It is bound vary with the headphones in use. The quality of sound is at most “above average” hardly having control over the audio spectrum. The sound lacks detail, depth and clarity.
THE SPEAKER
It’s a pleasant surprise. For its size its exceptionally loud, okay it’s a little better than those some cell phones have.
BATTERY
It’s one of the welcome feature. One full charge gives a cool 10-11 hours playback along with listening to the radio and speaker. Otherwise it gives a whooping 20 hours.ROBLEMS I FACED
Extremely painful to navigate the manus.
Starts auto playing as soon as you select a folder
No preselection is possible making the screen useless
The software more often than not load
The loading process is painfully slow
Customizing the equalizer might lead you to ‘x’ number of problems.
This is what I feel about Creative Zen Plus for you. Already I have spent quite some time. Please read the review and I would really love you to prove me a pessimist.' ''Note: Oh yes for got to tell you the price. Its okay.'''
Advantages: Very light, feacture packed, great price, looks great Disadvantages: Annoying power button, Cheap headphones
I bought this mp3 player around 2 months ago as I was after something smaller and lighter that I could take to work, as my current 20gb iriver mp3 player was just to bulky and heavy to have in my pocket all day.
I chose this mp3 player over others as it was very small, looked nice and with 2gb would also be plenty of space to keep enough music to keep me entertained for a month or 2 before changing it. Also the final deciding factor was the price, ... ...1 penny cheaper than the normal Zen stone which has less features such as the lack of LCD display and I believe has no radio.
My first impressions on opening the box were very good, the mp3 player looked very sleak in all black and although made of plastic the construction felt very sturdy and it did not feel cheap at all. One of the most surprising features is the weight, it is so light it feels no heavier than the average memory stick. It also ...
schismrule 25.01.2009
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Creative ZEN Stone with Speaker 2 GB
Advantages: Good battery life, easy to use, good value for money Disadvantages: No screen, very small so potentially easy to lose
...I knew from friends that Creative were a decent brand so I had a look on the internet to see what sort of prices we were talking, and I was pleasantly surprised. I found this 2GB version of the Zen Stone for £25 over a year ago and in my opinion that is great value for money. The battery life is very good and the fact that it recharges via USB is very useful. To transfer songs all you need to do is connect the player to your computer and drag songs ... ...The controls are straight forward, nothing fancy but from my point of view, this is all that's needed. The fact that there is no screen may put some people off but this was not the case with me as you can set in to random and hope for the best, or you can skip through albums. The headphones I found to be good quality as was the sound quality in general. Overall, I was pleased with this purchase as I believe it represents good value for money. ...
snedmuse 22.06.2009
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of Creative ZEN Stone with Speaker 2 GB
Advantages: small and easy to use, loud built in speaker Disadvantages: no display
This is a great little MP3 player. It really is tiny and light so you have to be careful you don't lose it! It comes with a plastic case and clip so you can attach it to yourself when you're out and about or at the gym, etc. It also has a great built in loud speaker which produces quite a loud volume considering the size of it! The pink colour is lovely for me but it also comes in a few other colours as well. It comes with a small USB cable and is ... ...to transfer onto it. It says that the battery is meant to last for 10 hours but so far I've only charged it for a few extra minutes here and there and it's definitely lasted a lot longer than 10 hours. The only disadvantage is that it doesn't have a display but if you know the rough order of your songs and it's easy to change folders then it really doesn't make a difference. I'd recommend it if you just wanted something small, cute, basic and cheap. ...
frankiefromings13 25.11.2008
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of Creative ZEN Stone with Speaker 2 GB
Sound Quality
Ease of Use
Look & Design
Range of Features
Value for Money
Quick review of Creative ZEN Stone with Speaker 2 GB
Fantastic little gadget, it is so eay to download music from your pc and very quick, unlike other mps3's I have used.
The inbuilt speakers are brilliant if you don't want to put on your headset or just to use in the car if you don't have mp3 facility or link on your cd player.
You also get with it a clear plastic cover and belt clip or you could clip it to your shirt etc..
Excellent value for money for a 2g player.
It,s really small and easy to attach to belts or jeans and brilliant for holidays and around the pool. I'm going to buy extras for it from the creative zens own website and am even considering having two one to leave at work and one for home. You cant see what's playing as there is no viewing screen but that's not a problem. Fantastic. ...
carole7 30.07.2008
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of Creative ZEN Stone with Speaker 2 GB
Advantages: realy small,slim Disadvantages: no screen
i got this mp3 player for Christmas and it good because its really small and it fits in your pocket. you can also get it in a range of different colours so it is great for boys or girls.The only bad thing is there is not a screen so you can't look what song it playing.Overall it is great.
you can fit up to 1,000 songs on it and the battery lasts for ages.
You should get a USB cable with the mp3 player when you buy it which you use for charging ...
louiserw 09.08.2008
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of Creative ZEN Stone with Speaker 2 GB
Product Information for "Creative ZEN Stone with Speaker 2 GB" »
Audio system
Capacity
2 GB
Digital Storage Media
Flash memory - integrated
Sound Output Mode
Stereo
Features
USB 2.0 compatibility
Speaker system
Speaker(s)
1 x speaker - built-in
Digital player (recorder)
Supported Digital Audio Standards
WMA, Audible, MP3, protected WMA (DRM 9)
Response Bandwidth
20 - 20000 Hz
Signal-To-Noise Ratio
90 dB
Total Harmonic Distortion
0.1%
Playback Modes
Skip playback, repeat shuffle
Supported Bit Rate
320Kbps
Headphones
Headphones Type
Headphones - binaural - ear-bud
Connectivity Technology
Wired
Sound Output Mode
Stereo
Response Bandwidth
20 - 20000 Hz
Impedance
32 Ohm
Connections
Connector Type
1 x headphones ( mini-phone stereo 3.5 mm )
1 x USB ( mini-USB Type B ), 1 x USB ( mini-USB Type B )
1 x headphones ( mini-phone stereo 3.5 mm )
System requirements
OS Required
Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit Edition, Microsoft Windows XP SP2, Microsoft Windows Vista
Peripheral / Interface Devices
USB port
System Requirements Details
Windows XP SP1 - RAM 128 MB - HD 40 MB
Windows XP 64-bit Edition - RAM 128 MB - HD 40 MB
Windows Vista - RAM 128 MB - HD 40 MB
Manufacturer's product description
Powered with a built-in speaker, share your music out loud with your friends. Small but impressively built, the ZEN Stone is the answer to ready music on the move. Carry it on you as you dance to the beat of your workout music. This MP3 Player has a sleek finish, and tiny ergonomic form. Featuring user-friendly plug-and-play capabilities, transfer files smoothly from the computer to your ZEN Stone and take pleasure in a selection of up to 500 songs as you bask in 20 hours of continuous audio playback. You can even download the free integrated software Creative Media Lite to enhance your ZEN Stone's performance. Tiny in size? But definitely big in value
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