I have been a long time Creative user having owned a Creative Nomad and Creative Micro photo in the past, and as such choose to keep with Creative for my next MP3 player. Generally they have always been of good build quality and lasted me a fair amount of time before wear and tear got the best of them.
Well the first thing to note is the size of the player. It's credit card width and whilst thicker then the Apple Nano it provides a feeling that it won't break if sat upon. The build quality is fairly good, and unlike the hard drive based players, it won't be at such a great a risk when dropped, and can be used whilst jogging with next to no risk of the player skipping. The screen is a good size for it's size and has very good colour and contrast.
Installation on the computer is via drivers on the CD provided, and doesn't take too long on an up to date computer. Though you might want to stop it from installing some of the unnecessary software, unless your a big fan of pod-casts or spoken book audio sites. It's important to note that as it's a fairly up to date MP3 player so it will only run on Windows XP or Vista.
The sound quality is excellent, as Creatives tend to be and has a slight edge over the ipod in that department, as well as volume levels (but only if you want to go deaf), though to get the most of it you'll be wanting to replace the headphones provided. Though sadly that will mean you won't be able to used to radio feature present on the player. A major limitation as it's one of the plus points that Zen's have over Ipods.
Battery life is around 24 hrs at 128kbps, but expect that to be a lot less if you use high quality MP3s.
Sadly there are a couple of negatives. My first gripe is that the menu lay out has changed which makes it a lot less intuitive then past players. So you might end up hunting through menus trying to find how to turn random shuffle off. Then there's an issue with the videos. Now I don't really bother with playing videos on MP3 players, but if you do you'll find that Creative has taken a step down from their Vision players. No longer can you play every type of video under the sun, and even more annoyingly is that the videos have to be a certain frame size to be played.
All in all though it's a decent little music player, and as ever a nice alternative to the ever dominant Ipod.
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Postage & Packaging: £0.00 Availability: refer to website
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shaaza 27.01.2008 (27.01.2008)
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Review of Creative ZEN
Advantages: Lots of storage, Works as mass storage device, Lots of features, Plays Video Disadvantages: Requires software to upload music, Big and heavy
Nov 28th, 2008
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