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I opted not to go for the overpriced Ipod, and settled for the Zen. The Zen satisfies my music needs, and has a bunch more features as well. I like the slim yet stylish design, although, I have it covered up with a plastic case that I bought to protect the screen. The navigation buttons can be a little unintuitive for new users, but the setup becomes routine after a little experimentation. I also enjoy not being forced to use Itunes, as with the Ipod. I don't really care for the song navigation though. I don't think anything can compare to the Ipod's cover flow selection, however, the Zen doesn't provide anything similar. The simple interface looks like an Mp3 player from the mid-nineties.
There are a lot of things I like about the Zen. The fact that it's built to be disposable is not one of them; yet, I couldn't face life without it. So, when my 18-month-old 2gb Zen quit working, I jumped on Ebay and found a used 4gb Zen, used, for $40 with free shipping. I bought it immediately and I'm glad I did, although I'm a little bit PO'd that the old one is not repairable. It's designed that way; the battery is not even replaceable without cracking the case open, even if you can find a replacement. So I guess I will have to buy a new (used) Zen every year or two; but at $40, I can afford to! The Zen is about the size of a stack of (about a dozen) credit cards. It has a bright, clear 2 1/2" screen and gets about 15 to 20 hours on a charge. It has great sound with most earbuds, especially the JVC "Marshmallow" type. One of the coolest features is the SD card slot. I have a couple of 8gb SD cards (which cost about $30 each, but prices are steadily declining) each of which can hold about 40 CDs worth of MP3s, hundreds of photos, or several movies. Of course, you probably won't watch Hollywood movies on a 2 1/2" screen, and if you wanted to, Creative's video converter app would probably take several days to convert them to the oddball proprietary .avi format this player requires. Short videos work fine, though. I'm a lover of jazz, funk and jam band music and so I download a lot of MP3s from Emusic.com (at 25 cents a tune). I will never buy DRM-afflicted downloads and have no interest whatsoever in the dreck churned out by the major music companies. The Zen plays MP3s, WMAs and even WAV files, and that's basically all I need it to do. It has a decent FM stereo tuner and a nice EQ (I leave it on the "custom" setting with a bit of bass & treble boost and mid cut, which sounds good with all kinds of music). TO BE CONTINUED.......Read full review
However, there are a few minor setbacks. I am a Mac user and I also purchase from iTunes and the Creative Zen is only set to work on Windows. On the Creative site it list a number of websites that sells music that you can use to make it much easier to transfer your music to the Zen than it would if you had protected iTunes music. This is a great mp3 player especially if you are sick of IPods. It has a great sound, a crisps image, and is the size of a credit card. I love it. It also has FM radio and a sizable screen which is great to watch your videos on. I have the 8Gig which is competitively priced against Apple's 8Gig which cost much more than Zen I have. I would highly recommend it if you want something simple and affordable.
The Zen is an awesome flash alternative to the Vision M. The player has enough storage to store a fairly large library of music with the included 4GB, the player also supports up to 32GB (theoretical) the largest available SDHC card currently being 16GB. The downside is that the players music browser is based on database indexing which does not spread to the card installed in the player, this means that music and media stored on this card needs to be accessed separately from the main menu. For this reason an SD card is ideal for larger videos in which the extra browsing is not often an inconvenience. The new screen is a 16 million color TFT at 2.5" which looks great at almost any angle and is far superior to the 64 thousand color Ipod Nano display. Durability is of coarse also a factor and this player during normal use is very resistant to scratches but certainly not invincible, it is best to keep the unit away from keys or loose change in a pocket as these items will damage the shiny finish on the players surface, the rear seems to be made from an anodized aluminum so it is very hard to damage. Final Verdict: With great battery life and an excellent price point this seems to be another iPod killer.Read full review
I recently bought a Creative Zen 2GB player and had it for about a month and for the most part it worked great. The only problem I had with that one is that it occassionally froze and I had to use a thumb tack to reset it. Unfortunatly this one was lost snowboarding (ironically I had to reset it with a paper clip on the mountain and because of that it fell out while on a run and we couldn't find it in the snow). I then bought another because I liked the one I had before but this one seems to have even more problems. It doesn't freeze like the other one, it just straight up crashes. During random songs the screen will just go black but the power light will stay on and if I try to turn it off it won't do anything. I actually let it sit for 7 hours one night while it was like this and it didn't do anything. Eventually I found a way to reboot the player using the recovery mode but it still is a pain to do every time. Other than those issues the player is great. There is good sound quality, several preset EQ's and a customizable one too which is kinda nice. Navigating the menu's takes a little bit to get use to but once you do it is really nice to go through them and makes finding songs really easy. The size is nice too, its not as big or bulky as iPods but still has some cool features. The SD slot is nice to if you want to put a lot of songs your MP3 player. Overall I think this product is a good entry level MP3 player that works great if your not going to be using it all that often. If your someone who is going to use it for more than an hour a day or so then you might want to find a better one but still not a bad find!Read full review