Left Turn at Albuquerque

After looking on Slickdeals one day a couple weeks ago, I found a great deal on a Creative player. The price for the 8GB version was around $84 plus a small tax fee for a refurbished 8GB Creative Zen MP3 Player. I decided to pull the trigger and buy the unit which I finally received a couple days ago. The unit shipped from California.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the box was the build quality of the unit compared to my iPod and Sony unit which I purchased recently. The creative player didn’t feel as solid although it’s just as light. The buttons feel a little cheap compared to my other players metal feel. Also when you push the buttons they make a clicking noise which is slightly annoying. The power switch is on the side and is more difficult to use because it’s not a button but a switch that needs to be held for a second. This can be seen as a good thing as it would be much more difficult to accidentally turn on the player.

Once the unit is powered on you will see the units flashy graphics and easy to operate menu. The menu is totally customizable in the ’system’ menu which is nice.

There are seven main features of the Zen:

• Microphone (lets you record things with built in microphone)
• FM Radio (old-fashioned radio!)
• Memory Card (view items on the built in SD card reader)
• System (adjust system properties)
• Pictures (view pictures)
• Video (watch videos)
• Music (listen to music)
• The microphone is something I’ll never be using but is a decent feature to have.

The FM radio is something that frankly I didn’t think I’d use but actually love. I get 30 stations (some better than others) in my area and it’s nice to hear random music once in a while rather then listening to the same 400 songs over and over.

The memory card is a very nice feature. I haven’t taken advantage of this yet but I can essentially double the memory of the unit for about half the price of what the unit cost and fill it up with movies for long trips.

The system has many features which can be changed by the user including info, video, audio, display, clock and more.

The pictures feature I don’t really use. Pictures aren’t very exciting when there’s video and the screen is too small to see much detail in the images.

The video looks average on this unit. The unit is 320 x 240 pixels and honestly the video looks a little blurry to me. However, videos are still very watchable on this unit. This player doesn’t play the popular MP4 video format that iPods do however the CD comes with a converter that works quite well and is quite fast for converting software.

The music is what I spend most of my time listening to. You can sort by artist, album, playlist and genres. The music quality is average. The supplied headphones are horrible though and add echo to the sound. I ditched them and used some 3rd party iPod headphones I had as a spare. The music sounds much better with them.

Overall I’m happy with this unit due to the large amount of features available. The key features that this has that many other players don’t are the FM radio, built-in SD card slot and microphone. However this unit does fall short in a few areas. It’s a bit thicker of a unit compared to iPod (probably due to the extra features) it’s not too thick but the difference is noticeable.

The button placement feels a bit akward and there are too many of them. The shortcut button is nice but the dedicated play/pause, back and info buttons are not necessary and could easily be incorporated into 5-button directional pad. Creative claims up to 30 hours of continuous audio playback. I got a refurbished unit so maybe my battery isn’t as strong but I notice about half of that amount of juice. I feel that the extra features outweigh the negatives of the unit.

Here is my YouTube video of the unit:

No comments »