I had been looking for a long while for an mp3 player before I decided on this one after a lot of people had said very favourable things about Creatives products.
Size:
When I got the Zen V plus It was smaller than I had imagined it to be, It's palm sized but for me that was an advantage. it is also very light so very easy to use on the go.
Ease of use
The software that came with it was very easy to load and use on my computer and it came with what I felt a basic instruction manual. Very easy to use and easy to manage the files on the mp3 player.
The mp3 player itself has a very easy to use menu and you can find the song you want fairly easy as you can choose either by all music, artist, song title or type of genre. The way that the songs are stored in the genres section is a bit confusing as some just are not in the right genre at all but the rest are great. To switch on the player just hold down the sliding button on the left side and by pushing this slider up it also locks it.
Althought the screen is small it's still easy to read and you can have a choice of background colour. Video and picture playback is also good on the screen. The FM radio has a good signal on it you use the joypad to find the stations and you can also store the stations you want on it.
The voice recording clarity isn't that great but it's good enough quality to still hear what you've recorded.
I think that the joystick maybe a bit fiddly to use if you have larger hands. I find it easy as I have small hands but my partner has problems as he has much larger hands. There are two buttons next to the joypad but they are bigger and easier to use.
Earphones:
Some people had said that the earphones weren't the best quality so I did purchase other earphones but I found that ones that were provided did provide a good sound but were far too big to fit in my ears so I'm glad I purchased the other ones.
Sound quality:
The sound quality is brilliant I still can't quite get my head around the sound quality being as good for something that is so small.
Apart from the joypad being small and the earphones being too big the only disadvantage is that you can only charge up the unit through the usb cable. I think you can get a mains charger from Creative for it but it's an extra layout. If you are an avid computer user then it's fine if not it might be worth thinking about another product or purchasing the mains charger seperately
I would really recommend this to anyone thinking about buying an mp3 player. I used to carry a personal stereo everywhere with me and I would say that this is 100 if not 1000 times better in every way.
