Audio
The sound quality on the Zen is very good as expected from Creative’s top of the range player. It has a 5 band EQ which has many presets and can be customised too.
The Zen supports two of the most popular audio compression codecs: MP3 and WMA, as well as being able to play WAV files (uncompressed audio) but they take up so much space that they’re not worth it at all. Personally I’d have liked to see the OGG format supported as it’s a free open source codec that in my opinion deserves to be up there with the more popular formats.
Personally I prefer MP3 as my format of choice, even though WMA should be able to achieve better compression ratios due to it being actively developed by Microsoft while the MP3 format hasn’t really changed in years.
During the playback of audio files, you can bring up the context menu and place a bookmark at any time. I’ve not really used this yet, but must admit it’s extremely useful for audio podcasts especially lengthy ones. Sadly the bookmarking wasn’t available during video playback which was could have been very useful given the length of most films.
There is an OTG (on the go) playlisting system on the Zen too where you can add tracks on the fly to a playlist. However I’ve not got to grips with this just yet, as it works much differently to the OTG feature on my iRiver H10.
Extras
There’s a simple FM Radio onboard the player which does its job nicely. The reception strength isn’t no where near as good as the radio on my iRiver H10 though. The Zen’s radio has a 3 bar signal strength indicator and mine seems to always fluctuate between 1 and 2 bars giving me an average quality reception. Yet the reception on my H10 is ultra clear almost always. As with my H10, the Zen can record off the radio too should you ever wish to.
Voice recordings can also be made with the Zen since it has a built in microphone, so it’s perfect for on the fly dictation if you should quickly need to. Recording quality is average and more then usable.
There’s an Image Viewer which looks very good with its photo manipulation options via the context menu. There’s also an Organiser with a Calendar, Tasks, and Contacts list. However I’ve no use for these features so I won’t be covering them.
Lastly, there’s a superb option to partition a portion of the hard drive into a MSC complaint device. MSC devices are external USB hard drives and USB Sticks/keys. The Zen can have a partition size of 512MB-16GB which can be recognised by ANY operating system. Also a great bonus is the ability to resize this partition at will without losing the data that resides within.
PC Interface
There’s a variety of ways to connect the player to the PC. You can install Creative’s own Media Explorer which hooks onto the back of Windows Explorer. With this you can upload tracks, and organise your player. Credit where it’s due, Media Explorer isn’t a bloated app. Its nice and clearly laid out.
You could also just use Windows Explorer instead, and drag and drop your content to the player. Some content doesn’t however seem to want to transfer across - mostly the odd poorly encoded video files, so I just ignore those files altogether.
Subscription services like Yahoo Unlimited and Napster can also be used with the Zen. Although I’ve not looked at these services as I prefer to add tracks manually myself.
Conclusion
This thing is a superb player. The screen quality, the interface and its superb video playback capabilities make it quite a joy to use. It features a host of extras that put it miles above the popular iPod. FM Radio, DivX and Xvid support for videos upto 640×480. WMA Audio support and strangely enough most of the WMV video’s I throw at it also work without a problem. It has a 5 band customizable EQ and lastly isn’t tied to a single subscription service (iTunes).
My only gripes for this player are that they should have included the ports contained on the dongle, on the player itself. I leave my dongle at home as I’ve no need to add songs while on the move, but it can be an annoyance to some.
Hopefully future firmware support will include support for the OGG audio format which I feel is a heavily ignored format and superior to both WMA and MP3. OGG is free and open source too so it would be ideal. iRiver and Cowon mostly tend to add support for OGG in their players, so why not Creative?
Lastly, include a sodding AC Adaptor in the box again! Yes I know nowadays people would prefer to charge their player from a computer’s USB port but what about those times when a computer isn’t available?
Overall, there’s little wrong with this player. It’s a brilliant bit of kit and I’d struggle to stay sane at work without it.