Ian Cox
14-05-2003, 3:21 PM
Well I decided to get one of these last week as I wanted an MP3 player for the Gym, going to work on the train and for holidays. I also wanted a device that could hold a decent amount of music and be fairly small in size. Before the Zen came out the only device that really met all of these criteria was the iPod but I was not going to spend £400 on a portable music player no matter how good it looks.
The Zen measures 75.9 x 112.6 x 24.5 mm weighs 268g and has an in-built lithium-ion battery which is meant to give 14 hours of playback, I have not been able to test this yet. The device looks good and fits fairly easily into a pocket. It has a small blue backlit LCD screen that is easy to read, USB 2.0 port (there is a firewire version available as well) and most importantly a 20 GB hard drive that is big enough to store 333 hours of MP3 music encoded at 128Kbps.
The sound quality of the Zen is very good with music having good bass and treble extension. As creative know a thing or to about digital music there is a whole host of controls to customise the music exactly to your tastes. The menu system for selecting music is a little bit quirky but once you get used to it, it is fairly easy to use even when you are on the move. There is no recroding facility as standard so this is basically just an MP3 player.
Transferring music on to the Zen is easy through the creative software and the new USB drivers allow you to transfer music via Windows Media Player 9 as well. Transfer speed it pretty quick with each song taking a couple of seconds, this is through USB 1.1 as I do not have a USB 2.0 port on my PC. Overall if you are thinking of getting an MP3 player then I would thoroughly recommend getting the Zen. I picked mine up from Simply Computing for £243.
8/10
The Zen measures 75.9 x 112.6 x 24.5 mm weighs 268g and has an in-built lithium-ion battery which is meant to give 14 hours of playback, I have not been able to test this yet. The device looks good and fits fairly easily into a pocket. It has a small blue backlit LCD screen that is easy to read, USB 2.0 port (there is a firewire version available as well) and most importantly a 20 GB hard drive that is big enough to store 333 hours of MP3 music encoded at 128Kbps.
The sound quality of the Zen is very good with music having good bass and treble extension. As creative know a thing or to about digital music there is a whole host of controls to customise the music exactly to your tastes. The menu system for selecting music is a little bit quirky but once you get used to it, it is fairly easy to use even when you are on the move. There is no recroding facility as standard so this is basically just an MP3 player.
Transferring music on to the Zen is easy through the creative software and the new USB drivers allow you to transfer music via Windows Media Player 9 as well. Transfer speed it pretty quick with each song taking a couple of seconds, this is through USB 1.1 as I do not have a USB 2.0 port on my PC. Overall if you are thinking of getting an MP3 player then I would thoroughly recommend getting the Zen. I picked mine up from Simply Computing for £243.
8/10