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Creative Labs’ brand new ZEN player is stylish, functional and packs quite a punch for such a small player. It offers real competition to Apple’s much hyped new iPod Nano — and with a bigger, better screen and more features it’s certainly one to consider as an alternative.

Creative Zen: a feature-rich media player that offers phenomenal all-round multimedia performance in an incredibly compact package.

Review Summary

Product Reviewed: Creative Zen 4GB

Also Available: Creative Zen 8GB, Creative Zen 16GB

Feature	Rating
Music	9/10
Video	9/10
Navigation/Controls	8/10
Features	9/10
Software (PC)	7/10
Ease of use	8/10
Overall	9/10 — Highly Recommended

First Impressions

This is a very attractive little player!

The first thing that strikes you about it is its small size… when Creative say credit card sized they really mean it. It’s light too, and certainly won’t be a burden to carry around all day.

The front surface of the player is a stylish glossy black, the back a beautiful matt-black featuring the ribbed concentric circles that are the hallmark of the Zen range. Build quality is good: the player feels sturdy and well made — although the glossy finish is prone to picking up fingerprints and scratches. A case to protect your player’s good-looks would be a wise investment. I tested the clear acrylic case and the leather case and found both to be excellent — thought the clear acrylic case with it’s circular clip was my favourite.

The clear acrylic case with key-fob — shows off your Zen while keeping it protected

The controls are located to the right of the large 2.5 inch display and incorporate a four-way navigation pad, a central selector button, a play/pause button, a programmable shortcut button, a menu button and a back button.

Some reviewers have complained about slow startup times — with the Zen taking around 30 seconds to boot up, but I upgraded the firmware on my Zen and it boots up from cold in less than 5 seconds… which is more than adequate. What’s more, if your player’s been used recently you’ll find that it starts up practically instantly.

Navigation and controls

Navigation is pretty intuitive, and the menu system is fully configurable… so if you don’t like the way things are ordered you can change it to suit.

The button functions are fairly obvious, although the centre select button doesn’t play/pause tracks as you might expect. Instead it drills down to show bigger album-art pictures and the track’s “star” rating. There’s a separate pause play button on the bottom right of the player’s face. It’s a bit strange at first, but you get used to it quickly.

Music

The Zen is, at its heart, a portable music player, and it’s no surprise that it performs the function admirably. It synchronises effortlessly with your Windows media player library, or supports drag and drop if you prefer to copy your music files over manually.

The quality of playback through the included Creative earphones is excellent, though I suspect it could be even better if you were to invest in a quality set of earphones or headphones. The player renders all of the subtle nuances of the tracks without any distortion and delivers a truly enjoyable listening experience.

The included Bass Boost and fully customisable equalizer means that you can tailor the Zen’s output to your particular taste.

Playback options are legion — the player supports playback by playlists, album, artist, genre, all tracks and a “DJ” feature. The later offer access to a random “album of the day” option, random play all, and a selection of auto-generated playlists featuring the most popular, rarely heard, highly rated or yet-to-be-rated tracks. You can, of course, choose from various play modes — like normal, repeat track, repeat all, shuffle and shuffle repeat.

Basically it has everything you could want and more besides.

The superb screen displays a host of information about the track that’s currently playing, including album art, and lets you drill down to see more info if needed.

There’s also a handy bookmark feature that allows you to store up to 10 bookmarks that let you instantly return to the desired point in any track — a boon for audio-book lovers!

Video

In a player this small I thought the video option was going to be just a gimmick. I was very, very wrong. With its outstanding 320×240 pixel screen supporting 16.7 million vivid colours the Zen delivers a video experience that really has to be seen to be believed in such a tiny device. Far from being a gimmick for viewing the occasional music video or downloaded podcast and impressing your peers, the Zen’s video feature is great for watching recorded TV shows on the road. You can even watch full length feature films on it.

To test it I put The Incredibles and Gladiator onto mine. They’re perfectly watchable. I was amazed!

Photos

Here again the superb display of the Zen comes into its own. Photos are sharp, clear and vivid, and are simple to transfer to the player using the supplied creative software or by simply dragging and dropping.

You can also set up slideshows using the supplied software for later viewing on your player, and can even use your favourite photo as your player’s background wallpaper. No more thumb-marked photos in the wallet — simply download your favourite photos to your player and away you go!

FM Radio

What can I say — it’s an FM radio that allows you to set up to 32 preset stations. It uses the headphone wire as the FM antenna, and reception quality obviously depends on your location and the signal strength, but it’s a great feature — one that’s lacking in many alternative players.

Voice Recorder

For me this is an essential feature for recording interviews. It works very well, and by programming it in as the “shortcut” option I have instant access to the voice recorder no matter what the player is doing at the time. No navigating through the menus — one click and I’m recording. Outstanding!

The microphone is sensitive enough to pick up a normal conversation, and the resulting file can be easily listened to on the player or transferred to the PC for archiving or future use.

Again a simple and very useful feature that’s absent from some of the competition.

SD Card Slot

The SD card slot is another boon — offering unlimited media storage. Take as many feature films, TV shows, photos or music files as you like with you on SD cards, and simply plug them into your Zen when you want to use them.

The only quibble is that the current firmware doesn’t integrate the SD Card content into the main media library — so you have to access it through the Media Card option in the main menu. No biggie — but it is something that Creative may want to address in a future firmware update.

Summary

The Zen is a remarkably accomplished media player in a very attractive, small, lightweight package. This player certainly gives the new iPod a run for its money, and for me it represents a better investment. I’d highly recommend it to anyone looking for a stylish, small, feature packed media player. Buy one, you won’t be disappointed.