Best Buy doesn’t have them in stock anymore, so I couldn’t take it back! I bought this MP3 player for my son’s birthday. He wanted an IPod. I did some research and determined that if you go an IPod, you were stuck with certain things; no changeable battery, an easily scratched display and a proprietary MP3 format that locked you into ITunes. After doing some research, I determined that the Zen Micro did everything that an IPod did for less and then some. It was more compatible with a PC format, had a tuner, acted as a voice recorder and could be used as a portable storage device. So, we talked #1 son into liking it and got one.

It was a little buggy and cumbersome out of the box, but downloading the most recent firmware seemed to fix the problem. #1 son partitioned the Zen’s drive so he could transport school work back and forth from home to school computers. Windows Media Player stopped recognizing the Zen as an MP3 device as Windows XP insisted it was a portable memory device. Ok, so the Zen software still recognized it as a player. The Zen software wasn’t as nice a MP10, but it still worked.

Then, for some reason, it stopped holding a battery charge. What good is holding thousands of songs if the battery life is only 30 minutes? Then the headphone jack quit working on the left channel. Zen tech Support admitted that the headphone jacks broke regularly. But, it was covered by warranty….if we sent it in to Zen on our dime. Well, we originally thought, “screw that.” But, after a conversation with the manager at the local Best Buy when he said that they had none in stock and probably wouldn’t carry them any more because of the high rate of returns, we knew we were screwed.

My original research didn’t find the headphone problem. But now that we have a broken jack, it seems there are lots of reviews complaining about the same thing. We paid the freight to send it to Zen. Let’s hope it works longer than a month when it comes back.

Oh, if I want to pay 20% of the original cost of the player, they’ll guarantee it forever. What a deal……NOT.


Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 225
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection