Creative Zen Micro Photo (8GB)

Unlike the original Zen Micro which arrived some time in late 2004 amidst great fanfare, there was little hoo-ha when its successor, the Zen Micro Photo, finally whimpered into the market, many months after its initial announcement at CES 2005 in January. There seems to be little doubt that the Zen Micro Photo's closest competitor is the iPod Nano, which also boasts a photo-viewing capability in addition to its primary function -- MP3 playback. However, the battle appears to be fought on a different scale this time round. Creative's new player ups the stakes with a whopping 8GB of memory at a reasonable price. On the other hand, Apple actually decreased the capacity for its midrange players from 6GB to 4GB, while making no attempt to decrease its prices though it did offer a lighter and sexier frame. We'll leave a shootout for later, but in the meanwhile, we'll delve into the differences between the Zen Micro Photo and its Editors' Choice-winning predecessor.

Design
The new Zen Micro Photo has more or less the same form factor as the Zen Micro, but with subtle changes such as a slimmer build of 17.8mm and a slightly heavier 115g weight as opposed to the latter's 19mm/108g. Upon close examination of the aesthetics, the screen now has a size of 1.5 inches, boasting a 262,144-colour OLED display.

The player's face is now bordered by a slight gradient, making the corners less sharply edged. The most obvious difference lies where the Power/Hold switch is located. If the player is left alone for a few seconds, the signature bluish light that glows from the unit will emanate from the Power switch. The pulsating blue glow that we loved of the original Micro thankfully remains intact. One change we welcomed immensely was the material used to make the battery cover at the rear -- a solid metal piece with a glossy coating which is far less scratchable than the plastic used for the original unit. Another cosmetic change are the words "8GB" and "MICRO PHOTO" clearly stamped onto the rear. The range of 10 colour choices remains though the original colours have been imbued with a more vibrant tone.

When we tried the unit under sunlight, we found that we could not make out the words on the display very well, even when configured at the highest contrast setting of ten, though admittedly we half expected this.

Features
The big draw of the Zen Micro Photo is its huge 8GB storage space, a significant increase from the 4 to 6GB capacities its predecessors offered and probably the largest storage space among rival micro hard drive-based players out there. It's still essentially an audio device with MP3/WMA/WAV support, but this time round there are picture-viewing capabilities (JPEG).

Similar to the 4GB and 6GB Zen Micro units that Creative launched in March this year, we find the unit's box stripped of the power adapter, belt-clip, stand and the neck strap to minimize costs. The only difference is that a beige velvet pouch is provided which we appreciated far more than the flimsy black pouch for the original 5GB Zen Micro. The standard package includes a USB cable, installation disc, earphones and one battery. We did notice that the Lithium-ion cell is rated at 830mAh as opposed to 680mAh for the battery included previously. This goes some way into explaining the rated 15 hours of life, which is 3 hours more than the old Zen Micro's 12 hours.

We tried out the unit to our satisfaction and found the user-friendly interface very much like the original Zen Micro's. The same customisation option where you can change the top menu with your selected options in any order you please gleefully remains intact. The FM radio with 32 presets and recorder along with the built-in microphone for voice recordings are still features that get our thumbs up. Should you need to use the player as a storage device, you can use up to 4GB -- half the unit's capacity, for this purpose.

Creative includes two applications that can be a tad confusing. The Zen Micro Photo Media Explorer allows syncing with Outlook, including your contacts, calendar and to-do lists while handling data transfers, though the job can be done through Windows Explorer, too. The task can also be accomplished just by using Windows Media Player 10, which is a big plus, assuming you don't want to install any software. The second application is Creative MediaSource which handles CD ripping, music file management and the downloading of songs through its music store.

The player has a great screen resolution though we can view the picture gallery only in a 3 x 3 layout. We like the ability to set wallpapers with your pictures, view slideshows and play with the zoom-in features. However, we were rather surprised by one aspect of the picture-viewing process. We simply could not view pictures while listening to music. We'd have to say that this is probably one of the biggest flaws in the unit. Hopefully, Creative will include a firmware update in time that will solve the problem.

Interestingly, the system requirements are now more stringent. While the original Micro supported all Windows operating systems from 98SE onwards, the Micro Photo supports only XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) and above. We tested the unit on a Win XP system without SP1 and found that even when the software was installed, the unit would not be detected, nor will it charge. We can only surmise that Win 98SE, me and 2000 users will experience these very same issues. As with the original, there's no Mac support again.

If there are comparisons with Apple to be made, one plus point to Creative is that you can just plug the unit into a PC and use Windows Media Player to transfer music, photos and playlists without even installing the Creative MediaSource or Zen Micro Media Explorer applications. This definitely adds to the convenience of using the Zen Micro Photo and makes data interchangeable between different PCs. By contrast, all iPods are limited by iTunes where you can never swap songs on an iPod when using more than one computer, unless you replace the songs with the second PC's library or use an external software like Podmaxx.

Performance
As with its predecessor, the Zen Micro Photo produces top-notch audio performance, helped by a signal-to-noise ratio of up to 96dB. The player produces powerful bass and vocals when tested with the provided earphones, though when the music is paused some background hiss is detected.

We can't say the same of the time taken to load the Photos folders. When we clicked the option from the top menu, we experienced a lag of 2 seconds while the system asked us to "Please Wait". However, the photo thumbnails, which are displayed once a folder is clicked, were able to load almost instantaneously which we welcomed very much. The FM radio produces quite a bit a background noise though recordings yield good reproductions. The built-in microphone does a credible job with voice recordings. However, we experienced a slight hiss in both our radio and voice recordings.

In our transfer test, the Micro Photo scored 3.6MB per second. We also got 14 hours and 10 minutes worth of playtime out of our review unit.

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