Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black)Reviews: Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black)
Batteries Included: 1 Binding: Electronics Brand: Creative Labs Color: Black Display Size: 2.5 inches EAN: 0054651143821 Item Dimensions: Label: Creative Labs Manufacturer: Creative Labs Model: 70PF216200111 MPN: 70PF216200111 Publisher: Creative Labs Size: 4 GB Studio: Creative Labs Variation Description: Black Warranty: 1 year warranty Features:
Rating:  - great clear musicI bought this to easily listen to the songs i like. Great performance, compatible with Rhapsody so i can quickly upload music. And i hold all my pictures on it. The sd slot quickly reads the card and transfers all photos to the memory. I love it. Rating: - Gift for GrandsonThis product was on my grandson's wish list for his birthday. He was pleased and in fact after charging it up he sent me a thank you email the next day in addition to thanking me when he opened his present. I love those wish lists. Rating:  - Better than i-podIt's better than the i-pod because it's only a fraction of the price, the screen is wide screen, comes with perfect ear buds and it has an FM radio. The picture is really good, not amazing, but good and worth the price. It plays so many video file types and holds so many photo file types. The radio connection is way better than most mp3 players. The microphone as always isn't that good but it's better than most and it's very useful. Most definitely I would rocomend it. Rating:  - Poor experience for audiobook and opera listeningI bought the 32gb version, primarily for audiobooks and classical. My experience has been poor: - The unit hangs frequently when I try to remove files from it, leading to paper-clip resets and subsequent "Rebuilding" (recovery) by the unit. - Track management on the unit does support nested folder hierarchy. - Ditto for display of tracks via filenames instead of tags. ID3 tags are notoriously (pathetically) inconsistent when ripping multi-CD sets, and fixing tags is extra work in addition to fixing filenames. - The "previous" function is awkwardly executed on the unit's UI. When I click on the bookmark to play a track and then want to go to "previous", it really makes more sense to take me to the album/playlist than to the bookmark list. That's a nit, I suppose. - Not a total loss, though. Battery life seems good and tactile controls are fine. - The auto-accelerating fast-forward/rewind are really helpful. So, this model is really sub-optimal if you have a large-ish collection and are into audiobooks and multi-disk sets. I liked my Cowon IAudio A2 much more. Then Cowon switched to a me-too touch-screen model that turned out to be a total loser. At least this Zen is sensibly controllable. Rating:  - magnificent display, decent design, terrible firmwareThe first thing you will notice when you pull this MP3 player out of the box is the large, sharp, and bright screen. For the price, it would be hard to find a unit with a better screen. So my first impression of this player was very good. My experiences with it over the 4 months since then have completely turned my opinion around. First, I'll tell you a bit about the way I use it. Mostly I listen to podcasts and music as I go about my daily activities. I also listen to the occasional audiobook. At the gym, I use it to watch tv while I'm on the treadmill. There is nothing wrong with the hardware in the creative zen. The sound quality is fine, and the design is functional if not ideal. What really kills this player is the awful firmware. I often wonder what the designers were thinking when they dreamed up the user interface. It typically takes 11 clicks to get from powering the unit on to hearing music. One example of how the software ruins an otherwise fine player is the battery life. Creative put a nice big battery in this player, but the software stupidly doesn't turn off the screen unless you lock the buttons. I typically leave the buttons on my mp3 players unlocked if they are in a jacket pocket, but this severely shortens the battery life of the zen. I'll go through the ways in which I use the player and why it performs poorly. First, forget about using this for audiobooks. If the unit is powered off for a few hours, it looses track of your place. If you forget to place a bookmark every time you set the player down, you will be in for an unpleasant surprise when you get back. How many hours did you listen to since the last bookmark? The fast forwarding feature doesn't help. Good players start fast forwarding slow and then ramp up the speed slowly as you hold the button down. This player has that feature, but it takes far too long to ramp up the speed and when it does ramp up it gets too fast far to quickly. You'll find there is a very small difference between fast forwarding 45 minutes and 8 hours. Also as a podcast player, this unit fails utterly. The bookmark problem persists, but with an added twist. When you resume a bookmark, the player forgets what playlist the file belongs to. So when you resume halfway through a podcast you will have to manually select the next one after it finishes. There is also the fact that you have to use playlists in the first place. With my old samsung, I simply put all my podcasts in the same directory and the player was able to understand that I wanted to listen to all the files in that directory. The zen stores the directory structure, but will not let you use it to play files. If you want to play all the files in a directory, you have to manually create a playlist. Then there are the bugs. I have never experienced the dreaded white screen of death, but the zen has many other creative ways to fail. Sometimes the unit just crashes while playing. It must be reset after this. Often there seems to be no reason for the crash. One second I'm listening, and the next I'm not. Don't have a mechanical pencil handy? tough luck. If the headphones are yanked out too fast, it crashes. If one of the earbuds touches a static charged surface, it crashes. If I unplug it from the computer without closing the synching software, it crashes. And sometimes the synching softare forgets that the player recognizes mp3 files. I will try to add a file from the software and it will claim the format is not recognized. But, if I manually drag and drop the file by opening the player as a drive in windows it accepts and plays the file just fine. And finally, the headphones. throw them out the instant you open the box. I'm used to earbuds being painful after a few hours, but these only take a few minutes to start hurting me. its like trying to walk around with marbles in your ears. Actually I'm not quite done yet. This player is great for one thing. Playing movie files once they are in the correct format. Converting a half hour file can take several hours, but once this is done the picture quality is beautiful. In short, I would not recommend this player to anyone, unless they plan to strip out the screen and battery. and throw the rest away. Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black) ReviewsMore reviews:Buy Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black) Sale Reviews Deals
Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black)
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