The Creative Zen portable media player has been launched only recently. With the length and breadth of a credit! debit card, and even thinner than a deck of cards in depth, and a weight of 65g, it has a superb 2.5 inch display with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and 16 million colors. It is available in 4GB and 8GB versions (Rs. 8,500 for 4GB and Rs. 13,000 for 8GB) and also supports external memory with MMC/SD cards.

The keys are placed with a five way navigation-pad, with a return and sub-menu key above it, and a customizable key and the Play/Pause key beneath. On the side is a 3.5mm earphone slot. Underneath that is the slider for Power and Hold activation and finally a mini USB slot at the bottom. The Creative Zen has a great resolution and as such, viewing JPEG images on it is a nice experience. You also have a choice of viewing them as a slideshow with music. You can set any image as a wallpaper, and there are themes to choose from.

Regarding audio visuals, although there is no direct link to the System Audio Settings directly from the sub-menu, it has a customizable EQ and presets. The Music menu has a simple alphabetic search option that makes locating files quite easy. The audio quality is surprisingly not as good as in the other Creative players and the headset comes with a very short wire. It has an integrated FM radio with a very handy Auto scan feature. The Zen also has a built in microphone for voice recording. The Zen allows playback of MPEG, JPEG, WMV9, MPEG4-SP, DivX 4/5 and XviD formats, but almost every file transferred to the device requires to be converted, which is a very time consuming process. The processed file and playback i:; great though.

The battery is really remarkable, and it has a really amazing back up time. The battery charges though USB via the PC.To sum up Creative Zen in a nutshell, it is a wonderful mobile device having an amazing display, a sound audio, a very useful extendable memory, a great battery back up, with a few hiccups like the earphones, time consuming process of video file conversion and a few navigation issues. Nevertheless, the Creative Zen is definitely worth the price.

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