Jonzee.com

Ive said it a million times before, I need a new portable music player. Right now I have the Creative Zen Vision: M, which I use as my main music player. I also have an iPhone. Comparing the 2 as a music/media player, my Creative player beats the iPhone hands down (I know all you fanatics will disagree). I love being able to throw any type of file on the Creative player without worrying about converting it. With the iPhone, I’m pretty much stuck to using iTunes (which I hate) and converting any video file to an iPod only format to view.

Ok now we all know I’m exaggerating a little. With the Zen, I have ran across some files hat I had to convert (if he bitrate is too high), and the Ipod does pretty good at playing podcast, especially with the MP4 and other "Apple only" format support that the Zen lacks. But on the other hand, I like Creative’s Podcast software better than iTunes and I hate those "Only for Apple" file formats.

The Creative Zen looks like it may be a strong contender for my music player replacement, there are a few problems with it though (and I’ll get to that later). The Creative Zen is a flash based player and it really shows in its size. Its about the size of a credit card (according to creative) and it has a 2.5 inch screen. I has most of the great features of the Zen Vision M, same interface same file format support (it plays divx and Xvid). and if you want to torture yourself with Itunes, it does support unprotected AAC files.

As far as he bad, there is no TV out. Video has to be converted to 320×240, and it only works in Windows xp or above (no Mac support although there are hacks to get it to work with a Mac)

One very attractive thing about the Zen is the price on the low end. You can get a 2gb for $79, a 4gb for $89 or a 8GB for $129. After that the prices fall in line with every other player with a 16gb for $199 and a 32gb for $299. Theres no difference in any of those options other than storage space. To make things a tad better, if you’re looking to go the budget route, the player has a SD card slot. You could pick up the 8gb version and later on, when you get more cash, buy a 8 gb SD card from amazon for $27.79 to make it a 16 gb player. Keep in mind that the SD card opens separately in a "file browser" format and is not integrated with the rest of the Zens interface.

Check out the Zen at Creative.