Zenalicious!
Written: Dec 07 '02
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Pros: Great Sound, Portable, Userfriendly!
Cons: They say 12 hours but only last 11...:)
The Bottom Line: You`ll need to expand your CD collection if you want to fully experience the Zen!
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| fancycrap's Full Review: Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox Zen (20 GB) MP3 Player |
The Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 has been such a success that is was only a question of time before Creative were to release a solid update. And here it is, The Zen!
Jukebox Zen is a very beautiful little thing in brushed aluminium. It`s about 5 inches long, 3 inches wide, and 1 inch thick, and weighs in at about 0.5 lb (don`t know the weight in oz. Sorry!). Creative states that is has a battery life of 12 hours, I measured to just under 11 hours, which still is impressive. It can play both WMA-, WAV- and MP3-files, and some maths tells you that you got room for 667 hours of music if you use 64bps WMA-files, and approx. 300 hours if you choose 128bps MP3-files. I`ve chosen to use music with different bitrates, and ended up with about 340 CD`s saved on the player.
The player supports both USB 1.1 (unfortunately not 2.0, which is far more faster) and Firewire. It is delivered with OK headphones, and nice little carry-bag, power-support, and a Firewire-cable. I used the Firewire to transfer my music, and I used less then 3,5 minutes to transfer 20 CDs from my harddrive. That gives you a transfer rate of about 12 secs per CD. If you transfer music directly from a CD, it all depends on what read-speed your CD player has.
Creative Play Center also comes with the player. This is a useful little program which transfers CDs to the player, synchronizes the music-library on your computer with your player (if you wish to) and rips CDs directly to the harddrive. This doesn`t function as well as e.g. Real One, but turned out to be more than good enough. You can make playlists and even - which you can`t on e.g. Apples iPod - use the playcenter to synchronize data with several computers.
User-wise the Creative has gone a long way since the first harddrive based unit. On the right hand side the Zen has a maneuvering-wheel, which is used for going through the menus. You can easily control the player with the use of only one hand, the wheel is sensibly placed for right handed people (who are the majority), and it is easy to find artists, songs, albums, and several other things.
The player has Creatives own EAX-technology built in, which makes you able to easily get the max quality sound out of the player. I have always been impressed with Creative when it comes to both Sound Cards and Speakers, and the Zen is no exception. There is probably not many MP3-players that sound this good........
You are also able to buy headsets with radio and recording equipment to the Zen.
The Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen is small, user-friendly and has huge saving capacity. When it also seems to be pretty solid, and not to expensive either, you can be nothing but impressed.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 340
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Epinions.com ID:
fancycrap
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Reviews written: 21
Trusted by: 4 members
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