Wander Your Urban Wasteland in Style with the Nomad!
Written: Feb 19 '01
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Pros: Very portable, easy to use, great sound, nice extras.
Cons: The price tag.
The Bottom Line: With its functionality, intuitive design, excellent quality, and nice extras, the Creative Labs Nomad II MG MP3 player is almost worth the price. Almost.
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| madtheory's Full Review: Creative Labs Nomad II (64MB) MP3 Player |
On treks through hostile environments, it is always easier to travel with a companion. Mountain climbers choose sherpas to lead them through the rocky areas of the Himalayas. Bedouins use camels to help them survive their travels through the barren desert wastes of Arabia. Personally, I prefer to travel with a Nomad. The Creative Nomad II MG, that is. It’s the only civilized way to wander through the urban jungle with proper musical accompaniment. Though with that $400 price tag, I sometimes wonder if would have been less expensive to just hire a band to follow me around. Yikes!
The first thing you notice about the Nomad II MG is its sleek design. The unit is a thin, metallic silver box that weighs only about 3 ounces. It’s the perfect size for traveling, as it will easily fit into a pocket, purse, or my personal favorite, the backpack. The controls are intuitive as well. The buttons for play, fast-forward, rewind, pause, and stop are arranged along the side so that the user can easily operate the Nomad II MG with one hand. The visual display itself is small, but I rarely look at the display while I’m listening to the player so that was never a problem. One of the pluses of the diminutive display is that it is equipped with a backlight that will light up the display in dark areas.
The Nomad II MG is also very functional. It comes with a docking cradle, rechargeable batteries, collapsible headphones, and a SmartMedia memory card. The rechargeable batteries are excellent. They took a little under 2 hours to charge fully and played for over 8 hours continuously. Not too shabby. I’m not a big fan of collapsible headphones so I immediately replaced them with my Koss TD-80s for better reproduction. The packed in headphones were quite good actually, they’re just not for me. The Nomad II MG comes with 64 MB of memory, which is adequate for most people’s MP3 needs. To further its functionality, Nomad II MG also contains an FM radio as well as a voice and radio recorder.
Also, the Nomad II MG supports Windows Media Audio and MP3 formats, and is upgradeable for new future formats. I really liked the upgradeability of the unit. It shows the company is making plans for the future. The file management software and USB connection are impressive. I filled up the 64 MB memory with my favorite songs in around 5 minutes, which is pretty quick compared to some other MP3 players on the market.
In conclusion, the Nomad MG II is an expensive, but impressive addition to the MP3 player market. It’s small, light and easy to carry with features that push it on solid footing with the competition. The ease-of-use of the file management system is phenomenal, due to a GUI similar to Windows Explorer. Creative Technology really pushed the envelope in the MP3 player market with the Nomad II MG. It’s just a shame they couldn’t ease off the price a little.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 400
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madtheory
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Location: Dallas,TX
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DON'T CALL IT A COMEB... wait. I guess you actually can call it a comeback.
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