Electronics : Creative ZEN 16GB MP3 Player

Rating: - Light and reliable (after an upgrade)
I was impressed by how light the player is.

I did initially have problems with the player locking up after playing continuously > 1 hour. Updating the firmware seems to have resolved this.

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Rating: - Good sound, good looks, poor reliability
The Zen is a good looking small player with a decent UI and brilliant sound quality.

A folder view and search function would have been a nice UI feature but they are missing. And obviously, the packaged earphones are not close to a pair of quality ones like Senn CX300s, Shure E3Cs etc.

As for reliability, when you transfer files to your Zen initially, don't try and transfer them all at once or it will freeze no matter what you use. When I tried to transfer 9GB, it seemed to give up halfway and required me to restart my laptop (Vista Premium 32) and reset the Zen. Transferring the files in chunks of about 2GB worked fine.

It has also frozen during playback which requires a reset (clears your settings like clock, name and theme).

In conclusion? Decent little player but I would expect much higher reliability from a flash-based top-brand product.

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Rating: - Stopped working after 2 weeks
I had been looking for a player like this for some time with a good screen and expandable memory, after seeing a few good reviews in magazines I purchased the 16GB version. I noticed that the battery only lasted for about 6 hours when it should have been 25. I went on the creative forum and saw that I wasn't the only one with this problem. Others had rolled back the firmware to an earlier version. I tried this but the firmware update failed half way through and the player would no longer turn on. After trying the creative helpline I had to send it back to amazon for a refund. Now I am waiting for another player like this to come out that is more reliable.

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Rating: - Great little player with solid video capabilities
I bought this a few weeks ago now as I was attracted to the video playback features. I have a creative zen Vision M and then I bought a higher capacity ipod just for the main reason that the M wasn't able to play itunes format and I was kinda happy with my iPod and went along quite happily then I realised something was missing and it was the zen's great video features.

iPods have a really tricky and annoying way of getting video's on to their machines and you basically have to buy them from the iTunes store...which I can see the point of if you watch pirate movies on your player and they don't want to land themselves in hot water with video companies but what about unlicenced anime or user made video's? It's just an absolute pain to get transferred over!

This is where the zen steps in with it's pretty much unrestricted video format library with no pesky DRM or any other annoying software restrictions and then you have the screen. It's crisp, vibrant and bright and watching anime on the screen with subtitles you can read the subitles perfect as long as the subber doesn't use any dumb font that would only be legible on a full screen anyway. It may seem like the screen isn't the same size as an ipod or a bigger media player but it is. It's a great little screen and superb for watching little movie clips, music vids and 30 minutes episodes of whatever you fancy. I personally wouldn't put a movie on this little thing but I'm sure it'd handle that just as well.

The conversion software is quick and very straightforward, one thing I found was a bug that it tells you the video conversion has failed right at the end of conversion but it did convert it properly and can play on your player, it's just a weird bug with the software...

The sound is vast and detailed and the interface is really nice with nice playlist features like tracks you've never heard or album of the day just in case you fancy mixing things up a bit. The browsing can be a little sluggish but it's not terribly bad. Also unlike the vision M that enjoyed crashing quite often these zen's seem to be free of the crash bug so that's another plus!

The USB cable is tiny short so buy an extender cable from your local computer store for around £3 - £5 or buy one from Amazon (I'm sure they'd do one) but it is a tiny little cable so you will probably need a longer lead, also the charge feature is through the pc so if you don't plan to hook it up to the pc often buy yourself a charger for this...however I do have mine hooked up pretty much 24/7.

The SD card feature I have not tried as yet but the support for HC cards is very handy and a feature I plan to exploit fully. Radio is a nice touch though I have yet to work out how you can scan manually with the radio and it seems to pick up stations on auto which could be a practical move as it only shows you the stations you can receive...Not sure but will have a little bit of an investigation.

Microphone and organiser are another good little additions which the iPod doesn't supply and you have to spend a further £10 - £20 on radio/Microphone *and* attach it to the iPod so it just adds to the bulk.

I thought that a 16GB player would not be enough but you do get a suprisingly large amount of tracks on there and with the SD addition there's always room for more. The screen can get grubby so best to buy some protection for your zen, I bought a little leather case and it's a nice case. It can act as a minature stand for your zen as well!

Overall a great piece of kit where it's benefits far far outweigh the tiny flaws such as small cable but that's hardly something that would distract from the player. Great purchase!

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Rating: - Creative ZEN 16GB MP3 Player
Had this for a few days now, this is my first review (ever in fact)

So far I'm very impressed, i was an avid iriver fan (and a bit anti ipod if I'm honest)I have found it easy to use, the software provided works well and made it easy to get things going, the video converter works well.

It's a great size, and the screen is great - and the sound is very good.

One criticism, only slight, is the buttons are a bit 'plastic'

I have so far only used this on a PC - but intend to try it on a mac soon.

One thing to bear in mind i think the 32gb version is coming out soon.

I put and SD card from my camera and it read the images very quickly, not sure how much I'll use the SD slot but it might be handy.

overall I'm impressed - if you don't fancy an ipod nano I'd recommend this as another option.