Zen Photo gives Ipod Nano run for its money

CREATIVE Labs has been long known for its Zen series of MP3 players. It's got small, it's got big ones, and it's got microscopic ones. It's the only direct competitor to fruity manufacturer Apple. Creative Zen Photo can give the Ipod Nano to run for its money.

The pack includes the player, a pair of white headphones, a white Creative labelled case, a manual, an installation CD and some promotional stuff.

Creative Labs Zen Photo player 8 GB

Just like the Ipod Nano, it has a 1.5-inch 262,000 colours display that will show off your pictures nicely and amongst other things it can play music. Creative Labs Zen Microphoto 8G has twice as much storage compared to the largest Ipod Nano 4GB player. It's wider and thicker than the Nano but it's also shorter. Zen still looks sexy especially when you see it live. The device has touch pad controls and it's very intuitive. I loaned the device to a few friends of mine to give it a try and nobody had any problems using it.

Zen Micro photo has an exchangeable 3.7 V 830 mAh Lithium Ion battery and the battery provides 15 hours of playback. To be precise we recharged it once and it took us a whole week of using the Viennese U-bahn before the battery ran out. You charge the device with an USB cable or with an optional re-charger. It's sad that you need to buy a re-charger separately but still it takes you just a bit more than two hours to charge your Zen Micro photo with an USB cable. Zen Micro photo uses a standard mini USB cable for recharging and for data transfer and just about any camera today comes with one. The cable is included in the bundle.

Zen Photo navigation

Other navigation is done using a touch sensitive keypad where you can go navigate menus, skip songs, go back, chose additional options, tune the volume, pause the song or navigate trough the pictures. The keypad is rather sensitive but you can change that in the options. The keys glow blue, which looks very nice.

When you turn the player on for the first time, it takes up to 15 seconds to start up. It sure is a long but it's just the first time. Every other time you turn it on during the day it will take just a few seconds before it's operational again. You can pick songs by artist, genre, album or you can actually play your own recordings. Of course you can make your play list. They only thing that we mind is that takes a second or a two jump from a song to song. I guess it could and should be faster. The other thing that would be good is some kind of mixer between the songs, something like cross fade plugging but we didn't se anything like that. You can search an artist of a song as well, set a bookmark in a song, view MP3 details, look up artist details, remove the song from the list or save as a play list. The best part is the volume key, it takes just a slide of your finger to turn the volume up or down, and it looks and feels very nice. Overall it will play your music just fine.

Creative Labs Zen Photo player picture, looks better live but we could not capture it

Picture player is new to this MP3 concept. You can store folders with your originally sized pictures - it's drag and drop easy and you can view them later on. You can play them automatically or just keep hitting next button until you get to the picture you want. It's very functional but it sucks that once you go to picture viewer your music stops playing. Where is the multitasking chaps? Pictures looks decent on this rather small screen but it will give you an idea who is on them. Once you transfer them from a player to a PC you will again see your original pictures. In our case we transferred 5 megapixel pictures and transfer is very fast indeed.

You can also record your own music and sounds on this device. You can record 10 hours of voice or any kind of music from the microphone and this will be enough for just about anyone. The device is equipped with a calendar, small organiser with task manager and contact data base. You also have a calendar and a watch to catch the time.

The sound transfer is very easy. You just drag and drop the music and it takes roughly five minutes to transfer a gigabyte of music. If you drag a video, the file player will advise you not to transfer it as it won't play on this device. It's a very nice feature that can save you some space. It's a heck of a lot faster than iTunes I can tell you, as this player doesn't care what kind of music you transfer and does it with the speed of USB 2.0.

Creative bundles its Media sound application that will help you transfer the music on the device, that will organise your music, rip your CDs to MP3 and even burn your music on CDs. It's a very nice and easy to use software package. You will be able to synchronise your music with Media player, it's very easy to do it and everyone has one, at least everyone with Windows.

Music on Zen Photo Micro 8 GB

There is an integrated FM tuner and you can memorise your favourite stations. It takes a moment to scan them, memorise and enjoy the sound of the radio. You can record the radio content as well.

You can use this device as a memory stick as you can address up to 4GB of space for data. It's almost got DVD capacity for data on an MP3 player. You can of course decrease your song space once you dedicate this memory to the data.

The test unit came with a Premium accessory pack that includes external charger, additional 680mAh battery, caring creative labs branded strap and a pair of excellent EP-630 earphones. The pack also includes the silicon skin that will prevent some series damage when you drop your player. It happens to the best and the worst of us. We have to admit that it takes some time to get used to EP-630 as it takes some time to learn the optimal position but once you get this right you will get incredible bass sound from these tiny headphones. The accessories pack costs around $49.99 or €49.99 and will sure be a great investment.

Design is slick and it's not that big is it?

Conclusion
If you care about functionality and not only about looks, this player is definitely something that you should consider. It's small and light. Still thicker and heavier than the Ipod Nano but it simply offers more features. It has a radio tuner, you can exchange the battery and replace it with the recharged one, and you can listen and record radio, use it as four GB memory storage and enjoy the nice sound of the music. The battery is really the great stronghold of this device and you will simply forget when you last recharged. You really need to work hard to discharge it. It has some flaws that we would like to see fixed, such as one to two second pause when you manually go from song to song, ability to watch the photos and listen to the music and some kind of cross fade mixer would be the things that we would like fixed. It's a great device that I can easily recommend to anyone that needs a player and wants to spend around €300, $300 or around £200 for a MP3 multi functional 8GB player. It looks great, maybe not as sexy as the Ipod Nano but it simply offers more. It's small and it's great and will offer you all you need I guess. I can highly recommend it. [We guess Fudo likes it. Ed.] µ