Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black)

I bought this for my boyfriend for Christmas. I gave it to him early so he'd have time to put all of his music on it and get it organized prior to the holidays. We were both surprised by how very small and light it is--it's very sleek and very portable.

We had some trouble getting started, though. The device frozen in the middle of a transfer, and then the computer stopped recognizing it for a while. We had to unplug it, wait for the battery to run out, then plug it back into the computer before it would work again. This actually happened several times, and with two separate computers. Maybe there's just a learning curve, though, because after we got the bulk of the music transferred over, it started working just fine.

I'd recommend this to anyone who is patient and not easily frustrated by minor (but time consuming) technical difficulties.

I bought this MP3 player mainly for my Napster To Go account, since it was claimed that the DRM is only known to be compatible with certain players. The fact that this player has one of the largest capacities of any flash-based player certainly aided my decision.

Creative is known for sound quality, so I have no complaints on that end when listening to music. I have never had a problem with a song skipping. If album art is available, it will show it while a song is playing, which is cool. There could be legal reasons for the loudest output sound being what it is, but I was slightly off-put that I sometimes have to have the sound turned almost all the way up in both the player and my car stereo when using the aux in while driving. Another thing that annoyed me was that you have to use Creative's ZenCast Organizer when putting music on the player that you intend to listen to on it. And when I use Napster to transfer the songs, any "The ..." band will be sorted under The, so I have been forced to get used to that rather than bother renaming the folders/track tags. The last annoying thing is that if I am creating a playlist on-the-fly, the "now playing" will always start with the album being currently played and you can only add songs to it. So for instance when I create a playlist of individual songs, I usually end up starting the playlist with a band that I only have one song from (so that is the first song on the playlist), rather than have the first several songs be an entire album.

I rarely use my player for anything other than music, though I did have a frustrating experience with videos. When you attempt to put a file on that has the wrong format (e.g., the video dimensions are larger than 320 x 240), it asks if you want to convert the video before putting it on. I tried this once and it was taking too long (probably over 20 minutes), so I stopped trying it. Besides video dimensions, it is also picky about the way the sound is encoded (it cannot play MPEG layer 2 files). But once I got a video on there, it played without any problems. The video quality is good.

I have only used the photo browser once, but it was fine. The player seems sturdy enough to withstand minor falls. The overall functionality of the player was not difficult to get used to. Overall I recommend this player for anyone who can withstand the few complaints I mentioned.

I went from the iPod shuffle (I know, I'm behind the times to this one). I love, love, love, love, love this. Great sound and it was very easy on the setup. Synced the first CD in less than a minute. I'll never go back to an iPod again! Oh and did I say I love it yet?

It's a nice player but it crashes very often. The only way to restart it is by inserting a pin into a small hole on the side (even that does not work properly and I need to let it run out of battery). I literally need to carry a pin with me all the time.
I wish I could return it.

I have experience with the Sansa e200 series, ipod Nano,, ipod classic, Sansa Clip, and the iRiver H20, and I can say that this is hands down the best MP3 player I've used yet.

It's lightweight and small, but with a large, colorful screen. It has excellent battery life, custom backgrounds, memory card support, and easy to use software to convert video files to the proper format.

The button placement may be a little awkward at first, but it is not hard to get used to. The best thing is the ability to search by letter: when you browse media (especially artists if you have a lot of music on it), you can press the 'right' directional button and move to a list of the letters in the alphabet. As you scroll from 'A' to 'B' and so on, it will move to the artists whose names start with those respective letters, and with a simple press of the 'left' directional button, you can browse through each artist again.

All in all, an excellent alternative to the ipod.