Considering the success of the Ipod it seems strange that Creative, essentially the king of the PC audio arena, has taken over a year to launch a stylish competitor.

The Zen is roughly the same size as the Ipod, but quite a bit heavier, using a retro silver/blue design as opposed to the Ipod's white.

Both USB and Firewire interfaces are present, and there's 20GB of storage space, which is more than enough for the average user's CD and MP3 collections combined - about 5,000 tracks at 128Kbps.

Data transfer is reasonably fast via USB, transferring over 0.5GB in half an hour. It was much faster with Firewire, completing in about 20 minutes.

The player installed simply, but transferring the files was harder. Disappointingly, it's not recognised in Windows Explorer, so you have to use Creative Playcentre to transfer files.

All files to be transferred first have to be logged in the PC Music Library section of the software, which takes up extra time - about two minutes for the files we transferred.

Another associated problem is that only MP3 and wma files can be transferred; you can't store any data, wav or its Mac equivalent aiff files. With the Ipod you can store these files, but not play them back.

The lack of remote on the headphones was also a shame. Battery life was very good at around 12 hours (longer than the Ipod) and it charged up within a couple of hours.

The player can also be charged through the USB port, making one less cable to carry around with you, but the Zen does take far longer to charge through this method.

Despite our concerns over ease of use, this is a worthy rival to the Ipod, easily winning on price and capacity, but losing out in the vital looks department.

Contact: Creative
http://europe.creative.com

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