Creative Zen Portable Media Center 20 GB

Author's product rating:   

Video Quality
Sound Quality	Good
Range of Features	Excellent
Ease of Use	Very Easy
Value for Money	Good

Advantages:	Style, excellent screen, long battery life, big storage  -  ipod eat your heart out
Disadvantages:	Bit bulky, small buttons

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

What can I say about the Creative Zen Portable Media Center? How about, I almost wet myself when I got this little gadget for Christmas, I was so excited. But enough of my bodily functions, lets talk about this nifty thing and why everyone should own one.

Look

The first thing that anyone would notice is the look – a little cool black box, which comes with its own funky little black case. How could anyone want for anything more? I must admit, I’m completely shallow when it comes to cool looking gadgets.

Storage Capacity

Enough of the complete shallowness, what’s probably one of the more important features of the Portable Media Center (PMC) is the huge storage capacity, coming in at 20 GB. I must admit though, I would have preferred something close to 40 GB, but it seems that 20 GB is more than enough. I was surprised how much video could be stored on 20 GB.

Screen

The 3.8 inch TFT LCD screen is well cool. It is backlit for excellent picture quality for something so small. The resolution of the thing is 320 x 240, doesn’t sound impressive but I found it to be more than enough.

Onboard sound

This feature of the PMC I found to be a really nice touch. It has it own inbuilt speaker, which produces a really nice sound. I found it to be good for in-car entertainment. Of course you can use the headphones that comes with it – really good quality ones too.

Video

This is where I thought the Creative Zen PMC would fall short, but I was surprisingly wrong. The PMC compresses video files so small that up to 85 hours of movies or recorded TV programmes can be stored on the hard disk. The only issues I have with this, is that it can take ages to transfer these files onto the PMC. But a trade off I can live with.

Compatible video files:

• Windows Media and Photo Story files (.wmv, .asf) at a resolution higher than 320 x 240 pixels and/or at a bit rate higher than 800kbps
• Microsoft Recorded TV Show file (.dvr-ms)
• MPEG movie file (.mpeg, .mpg, mpe, .m1v, .mp2v, .mpeg2)(4)
• Windows Video file (.avi)(4)
• Windows Audio file (.wav)

Music

The PMC can store up to 9,000 songs in a variety of formats:
• Windows Media Audio files (.wma)
• MP3 audio files (.mp3)
• Windows Audio Files (.wav)

What’s even cooler is that capacity to download music licences, brilliant for playing downloaded ‘rented’ music from sites like Napster.

Battery

I was well impressed with the battery, it can be changed – yay! Fully rechargeable and can provide up to 22 hours audio playtime or up to 7 hours of continuous video playback. Extra batteries are also quite cheap, brilliant for when you’re on that long haul flight and the in-flight films are rubbish.

Operating System

Comes complete with the Windows Mobile operating system, which functions fantastically and looks a lot like the Windows Media Center. It makes the synchronisation with any windows pc totally painless.

Well, I think I’ve gushed enough about this wonderful gadget. Obviously there are a number of features that could be improved, most importantly of which are the small buttons, which can be a pain in the backside sometimes. If that’s the calibre of the bad points of the PMC, then what are you waiting for, go buy one…