So I upgraded from the original Nomad Jukebox 6gb to the zen 2.0. It was exactly what I wanted – smaller size, bigger storage, and better battery life (built in lithium with up to 14 hours) – all in a nice silver case.

In my opinion, the Create Nomad Zen is a great hard-drive based MP3 player for the PC person. Granted, Apple makes the ipod for the PC now, but I’ve heard mixed messages on how easy it is to use with the software provided – and third party softwares?! That’s getting confusing! If you have a MAC, it’s a no brainer…get an ipod. But I am a PC person….

Here is what made me select the zen over the ipod:

1. Price! The zen gives you 20gb for around $200 less than ipod (depending on where you shop)

2. PC compatibility – I was weary of the way ipod would work on a PC.

3. Familiarity – I have enjoyed my past Creative MP3 player, and I think their website gives excellent customer service, both offering driver/firmware downloads and software updates. They also answer questions quickly when you submit one on their site.

Looks
The zen is significantly smaller than it’s predecessors (jukebox 1, 2, 3). It’s smaller than a portable tape player, but bigger than a deck of cards (ipod). It has a very solid feel to it and it comes with a nice black carrying case. The display has improved, and has a pretty blue backlight.

Storage
20gb allows you to store around 4,000 songs. Estimating 12 songs per CD, that’s well over 300 complete CDs!

If I have a nomad jukebox already, can I easily transfer to a zen?
Yes. Although you can’t transfer from jukebox to jukebox without a computer, it was very simple to take the 5gb of songs I already had loaded on my jukebox 1 and transfer it to the zen. All you do it connect both players and open the PlayCenter software. Select nomad jukebox on both sides. Then, from the drop down selection list on top (on both sides) select jukebox 1 on the left, and jukebox 2 (your new zen) on the right. Now just select the tracks you want to transfer. I have one gripe about this process though….I tried to do the whole thing, and every once in a while it would come up with an error and say “Player not connected”. All I would have to do is unplug the USB cable to the Zen and plug it back in…then resume, however – the song that caused the error would not transfer. I had about 20 or so songs out of 1,000 that I couldn’t transfer. Not sure why this happened. I intend to go back later and manually load those lost tunes.

(Side note to the above gripe) – my friend wanted me to transfer my jukebox 1 to her ipod. Using her ibook, I did this and was able to transfer the entire contents of the jukebox 1 to her ibook with NO ERRORS! I guess it’s true what they say about Apple….but still, macs confuse me so I’m remaining a PC person for now…errors and all.

Software
The PlayCenter software is good and very easy to use. It’s a 2 panel window, similar to windows explore, and you select the songs you want and click on transfer. A status bar shows you the progress. I have a complaint about this too: By default all the tracks are selected to transfer (check box in front of song title). If you only want one song you have to uncheck all the other songs….kind of a pain, but similarly, I don’t want to select them all when I want them all. It would be nice if you could drag & drop – or if there was a check all/uncheck all option.

Features
Zen has a lot of features. Playlists, artist/title/song sorting, bookmarks (you can set a bookmark and go back to it later…helpful for books on tape). The EAX lets you set your listening experience to many different things – train, plane, and there’s volume regulation so that when you’re listening to your MP3’s and some are higher quality than others, you won’t be blown away when that low quality song ends and a high quality one starts. You can fast forward through a song just like a CD player, by holding down the next button. The separate volume control is good too, unlike the ipod where the scroll wheel becomes the volume (what if you want to turn it down while searching for your next song?) Zen has a scroll wheel for searching through your music and the volume as separate functions.

You can create and save playlists, delete songs/artists/genres right from the player. All these options make the interface a bit complicated. Sometimes when you click the scroll wheel you expect to be at “play now” but you’re still at “delete” from the last action you took. So there’s a lot of scrolling being done to set up your playlists – but once they are saved it’s as simple as turning it on, selecting a playlist and off you go! It’s very intuitive, and I picked up on it very quickly without reading the directions.

USB 2.0
I have a notebook with a USB 2.0 card, and it transfers very fast. The UBS 2.0 version of the Zen is about $50 cheaper than the firewire version…and since I plan to fill my Zen and keep most of the songs on there, I opted for the cheaper version. This is also backwards compatible with USB 1.1 so it will work on virtually any computer. (The other Zen has USB 1.1 and firewire, so it too will work on any computer)

More good things
Instant startup! Unlike my jukebox 1, that took almost a minute to start up (seemed longer) the zen starts up instantly! The included carrying case feels nice and allows you to access all the controls (except the USB port). The price is right for a 20gb player of this size and I think it’s really going to give ipod some competition, at least from PC users. I’m very happy with my Zen and I definitely recommend it!









Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 230