It glows blue and is packed with features!

When my 128 Acer flash stick just proved to be too small to accommodate enough music for sustained listening, I have been on the lookout for a new mp3 player for quite some time now. However, I definitely wanted to avoid the iPod hype and get something a little more unique, something I won’t see on every corner of the street. And then, on school trip, I saw this blue glowing little player in my classmate’s hand, and just had to have one like that!

Creative Labs is a well known brand in soundcards, speaker systems and also mp3 players, and this particular player lived up to my high expectations with only a few flaws.

The package is quite nice; there is a large picture of the player on the front, matching the colour of what’s inside (there are 10 colours available). Just in case you couldn’t see that properly, there’s also a little sticker labelled “player colour” in one corner of the box. The contents are of course the player itself and its battery, neatly nestled in protective foam, a manual in many languages, the driver CD, a rather short, white USB cable (bit less than .5 m), a little catalogue of other Creative products and the bundled headphones.

The player looks really nice to me, which never comes across on all the pictures you can see of it on the web. Its dimensions are 8*1,5*5cm (l*h*w), and It’s slightly oval, so the very centre of it is the widest part, but only by a few millimetres. The screen measures about 3*2,7 cm, and is quite scratch resistant as I found out over time. The top of the player bears the USB port, headphone jack, a little hole for the internal microphone and an on/off/hold switch. It’s controlled via a touchpad interface, with five fields to “tap”, such as fast forward/next song, rewind/previous song, play/pause and two more to control the menus. The middle of the touchpad is occupied by a scroll area, with the help of which you can rapidly scroll through the menus by moving your thumb up and down, just like a designated scrolling area on a laptop touchpad. The backplate of the device is also the battery cover, removable by sliding it downwards. It has a quite solid feel and is mate of metal, so there’s no risk of loosing or breaking it.

One of the main reasons I chose this player was not just the anti iPodness, but the vast amount of features it offers. Playback formats include mp3, WMA, Janus, WAV and IMA ADPCM, while also being compatible with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure subscription service, which they unfortunately have cancelled in favour of the Zune nowadays. Useful functions include the built in FM tuner, which delivers crystal clear sound, the quite decent internal mike for voice recording and the removable battery, which is a really useful feature that no iPod can offer! The OLED screen is really nice, rich in colour and just a pleasure to look at, making it possible to view photos on it. One wouldn’t really use that feature on a daily basis, as the screen is quite small, but it’s nifty nevertheless.


Getting started:

Normally, you just plug it in, let Windows recognize it and sync it with Windows Media Player or just drag&drop your music onto it. Sadly, this device is not plug and play compatible, and requires you to install the special drivers from your CD. Not a very good first impression there. However, this seems to have been an issue of the computer that I usually use, as my Laptop recognized it as an MTP capable device. The driver CD also contains Creative’s MediaSource application, which is supposed to make it easier to maintain and sync your music collection. Due to the fact that I’ve only heard negative feedback about that software and use WMP to collect my songs, I didn’t even bother to install it. One doesn’t even need it, as you can sync the device with WMP after installing the drivers, or use Creative’s Media Explorer, basically Windows explorer designed for adding and removing media to and from the Microphoto. Another disadvantage that showed itself is the fact that no power adapter is included, so you have to charge the player via the USB port, which could turn in to a problem if you don’t have your PC running all day like I have ;-). Or you can buy an USB power adapter of course. Other than that, the device ran flawlessly, some gigabytes of music being transferred in just a few minutes. After unplugging it, you have to wait some time for the device to build up the library, but then, you’re ready to rock!


Rocking out Loud

The sound quality is flawless, one of Creative’s strength, as they’ve been in the music and sound device business for quite some time, with many high quality products. The sound is really clear and warm, leaving little room for improvement. There are, however, some other issues that I somewhat disliked. First of all, the headphones are not the best Creative has to offer. Although providing excellent sound, there is a very quiet crackling noise at one certain very low and very high frequency, as I’ve found out trough experimentation. At first, I thought the player was defective, but after hooking it up to my stereo and turning on full blast, I knew that it had to be the headphones (also tried the headphones with different devices, same issue). Many people probably won’t notice this, as it might occur in about 1 in 50 songs, but I’m usually very thorough with issues like this. The second minor annoyance is a little sizzling sound that is always present, when the display is lit up, but as long as I know that It’s only the display, I can’t really complain that much. Other than that, the sound is flawless throughout the entire spectrum. If you’re fussy about how you hear you music, there are a number of EQ setting, plus a customizable IQ where you can set all sorts of frequency ranges. Other audio settings include SmartVolume that doesn’t lets the Volume exceed a certain level. Nice, if some songs are much louder than the others. Not nice, if a song is supposed to really kick in, getting louder at some point. Decide which is best for you. Last not least, the bass boost, if you have the right headphones or hooked the device up to external speakers, delivers an even deeper bass than on default and shows just how much power this little guy has!


Controlling it

The entire interface is built up quite logically, no problem finding what I was looking for. There are many options on the appearance of the main menu, as you can select what goes into it and what gets put in a submenu, a really nice feature. You also get to choose from different colour themes, such as peace, jungle, fire etc, while also being able to set your own background image. Other standard functions include playback options, backlight and snooze timer, idle sleep timer etc. I honestly don’t think that you’re going to miss any setting with this player.

The photo viewing applications is quite nice to fool around with, but you can’t look at your photos and listen to music at the same time! Strange, but you won’t look at you photos on the tiny screen that often. The microphone is quite nice, the sound recording sounds a bit flat, but everything is clearly audible, so if you want to use it as a voice recorder, go ahead. All that you say will be saved as a WAV file, which you can extract to your computer. The FM tuner, though many people claim is useless, provides really enjoyable radio, with autoscan and manual tuning. You can also record from your radio directly onto your player, unless you install the latest firmware. Creative seems to fear legal trouble and has deactivated the fm recording on all players through the new firmware, but they seem to be reversing this at the moment. Just don’t install the latest firmware, as it doesn’t offer any real advantages.

Navigating with the touchpad was also deemed as difficult by many people I’ve met who have used this device, but I really liked it. It’s almost fun to just scroll through the menus with this thing! Apart from the “tapping” buttons already mentioned, there is the thumb scrollbar in the middle, which you will probably use to skim through your music, looking for the next song to enjoy. Moving your thumb up and down lets you scroll normally, as used from a laptop, while holding your finger on the top or the bottom lets the tracks fly past you at high speed, when looking for a song by alphabetical order for example. Tapping in the middle of the bar will serve as a play the song/open the desired menu button.


Sad but true: Battery life is not the greatest

One of my biggest complaints about this otherwise great player is the battery life. It’s supposed to have around 15 hours of playback time, but as always, this is the raw time. If you charge it up completely, unplug it, start playing your songs and leave it alone, It will probably reach or even exeed the 15 hours. But selecting another song, with the display lit up, turning it on and off, greatly reduces battery life. If you’re one of the people who always jump to the next song after the intro, you’ll probably have the battery drained in a matter of a few hours. Apparently, the device also uses a small amount of power when turned off, as it has two kinds of “off modes”. One could be considered standby; when you switch it on, the display lights up and the music starts playing immediately. The device will stay in this mode for a few hours after you turn it off, and then go into deep sleep. When turned on, it needs some time to start playing, about 10-15 seconds. In both cases, the player seems to use battery power, which you can check out yourself: When in deep sleep, but the earbuds into your ears and unplug/replug your headphones. You will hear a crackling sound, revealing that there is a current on the headphone jack. Though it never happened to me that the battery, full after charging, showed one bar less after a few days of not using it, but I don’t think that the battery life is improved by this off mode battery use. I can’t really give a statement about the actual battery life, as I use the player quite randomly, while going to school or lying in bed, it usually holds out for about two weeks. I've recently noticed an increase in battery life, as it went through several complete charge/discharge cycles, a requirement of today's batteries to deliver maximum capacity. Overall, I think that the battery life is satisfying.

Even though the battery is not the strongest, the major advantage of the Zen over the entire iPod family is the mere fact that any user can remove and replace the battery! You can get two new batteries in a pack for about 40$, which is quite a bargain. When on the go and out of juice, you can just take out the empty, pop in a new one and continue rocking, if you buy those, a big plus point for Creative!


All in all, this is a very decent and feature packed player with great sound quality! It’s not the ultimate iPod killer, due to the fact that the battery life is not the best nowadays and the bundled headphones not being the best Creative has to offer. But other than that, it has style, capacity and a very scratch resistant surface, as I’ve noticed no scratches on the display or the casing since the three months I have it. The audio quality fulfilled my high expectations, and the price is quite low for such a high quality player.

But the definite eye catcher of the Zen is surely the blue glow! You see, when you access menus or jump to the next song, anything that will turn the display on, the outer rim of the bezel is illuminated, as if the entire player would be encased in a blue frame! It’s just soooo cool! All the photos on the web just don’t show how nice this looks, you’ve just got to see it for yourself!

If you've got any questions about the device, feel free to comment!

UPDATE: I've just checked Creative's website, and they have in fact re-enabled the FM-recording feature! Just got to their homepage www.creative.com, select "support" and then "downloads" to find the latest firmware for this player. There are also other improvements like support for audible content, more responsive menu etc. just check out the description of the download!