A comparison of the new Creative ZEN MP3 player to the new 3rd generation iPod Nano from Apple.
While ZEN has the advantage of the bigger screen, radio tuner, voice recorder, wider format support and an SD expansion slot, it all seems to fade away when you have to deal with bugs and annoyances at almost every turn (slow to start, locks up if format not exactly right, cheap, awkward controls, screen doesn't turn off,...) Full list below:
Creative ZEN Pros:
- Can be used as external disk
- Supports drag and drop (copy/paste) to player
- SD expansion slot
- Sound recorder
- Radio tuner
- Credit card size
- 2.5" screen, 16.7 million colours (not bad if you don't see iPod Nano next to it)
- Comes in 16 and 32 GB models
- NOT an iPod ;)
Creative Zen Cons:
- Only 10 Euro cheaper than Nano 3G, or even same price (200 Euro) - 8GB version
- Design only OK, no match for iPod Nano
- Plastic front and back
- Considerably bigger and thicker that Nano 3G
- Supplied USB cable ridiculously short?!?!?
- Takes it's sweet time to turn on
- Starts charging EVERY time you connect it to PC (not good for battery life)
- Battery not user replaceable
- Controls feel cheap, bad tactile feedback
- Interface itself lacks style and grace, looks very plain indeed (can change colours)
- Screen resolution (320x240) not enough for the screen size (2.5")
- Picture therefore looks soft and dark scenes look very badly pixelated (like on cheap LCD monitors) although it could also be due to encoding (used best quality available on Creative's software), other scenes look very good though
- Screen doesn't turn off automatically, you have to lock the player first (annoying!!!)
- When music playback stops, even if the screen has been locked and turned off, it turns back on again and waits for you to do something even though you may not want to do anything and is wasting battery power
- Fast forwarding pauses the image (can't see where you are in the movie)
- Long software installation, bloated software (expect 116.88 MB of updates)
- Poor format support implementation, locks up if video format not exactly right
- Requires transcoding, which is SLOOOW on bundled software (slower than real time, i.e. a 40 minute video will take up to an hour to encode!!!
- If encoded with 3rd party software (WinAvi) goes out of sync and/or locks up even when you use the supposedly supported XviD and the proper resolution of 320x240!!!
- Audio browsing is very basic (you only see artist OR title OR album, not all at once)
- Stops playback after just one song in the genres, artist, album, song ... erratic, i.e. will play one or two then stop?!?! Only all tracks will keep playing?!?
- No UMS support
- Does not support gapless playback
- Photo viewing slow/sluggish (could be due to large file sizes, 10 mega pixels)
- SD card does not integrate into Library, Favourites, ...
- Ear jack can't power high end ear monitors (i.e. Etymotic 4)
- Sometimes large files (cca. 1h+) go out bit of sync (even when encoded with creative's own converter!)
- No Bluetooth, no WiFi
- Bad, bad name choice (search brings back all other Zens, i.e. Vision M, Stone, Stone Plus, V Plus,...) makes looking for reviews, accessories, support, whatever a pain
- "Viral marketing" on the internet (fake review: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/53466/apple_ipod_nano_versus_creativ...)
- ZEN's firmware version in this review 1.31.01e
- Time of review mid December 2007
- Remember, keep a paper clip handy!!!
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