Creative Zen Vision:M  

Design
Shorter than a 5th generation video iPod but also a few millimetres thicker, the new Creative Zen Vision:M is indeed a good looking device. The player features smooth rounded edges and comes in three different colours in Australia - black, white or green (US consumers, for some reason, can also choose from pink and blue). Whatever colour, the front finish on the M is smooth and shiny, with the back panel sporting an interesting round rippled effect. But if our black review unit is anything to go by, it's a finish that scratches rather easily. Luckily, Creative bundles in a soft drawstring carrying case with every Zen Vision:M.

The front of the M is split in two horizontally, with the top half dominated by the large, bright 2.5-inch colour screen. Below the screen is the M's main navigation button, a touch sensitive vertical pad. It can be used to scroll through menus by sliding your thumb up or down, or accept selections by tapping a thumb anywhere on the touch pad. The vertical touch pad's left and right edges can also be pressed to navigate through menus, songs or photos. Surrounding the vertical touch pad are four buttons - a play/pause button, a context-sensitive options menu button, a back button and another button whose function can be assigned by the user. All of the buttons feature a blue backlight, which only adds to the Zen Vision:M's cool factor.

As you can probably tell, we're fans of the Zen Vision:M's form factor - it's just the right size to fit easily in jeans or pockets and feels nicely weighty in the hand. Creative has made a strange decision with the M's dock connector, however. About the size of a small matchbox, this small, white dongle connects to the bottom of the Zen Vision:M and contains the connectors for power, USB and AV-Out. So that means to charge up your M or to transfer songs, you'll need to connect the dongle to the player first. It's a pity Creative couldn't incorporate all this functionality on the player itself, as this little dock connector dongle is something we can forecast being misplaced or lost quite easily.

Features
The immediate thing that grabs you upon switching on the Zen Vision:M for the first time is its outstanding colour screen. The 2.5-inch LCD has a resolution of 320x240 pixels and can display an impressive 256,000 colours (as compared to only 65,000 colours on the video iPod). Images and video absolutely pop out of the M's screen - it's vibrant and colourful, and it's a joy to look at.

Creative players have long put iPods to shame when it comes to features and the Zen Vision:M is no exception. As well as music, photos and videos, the Zen Vision:M also has a nifty FM radio tuner, recorder (for both voice and the FM radio), and it can sync to Microsoft Outlook.

At 30GB capacity, Creative says the M can store up to 15,000 songs, tens of thousands of photos or 120 hours of video. When it comes to music, the Zen Vision:M supports MP3, WMA and WAV files, while it can read JPEG digital photos (as well as BMP, GIF, TIFF and PNG files after conversion). Video support is similarly impressive - as well as MPEG1/2/4, it can also read WMV9, AVI, Motion-JPEG, DivX 4 and XviD. This makes the M a much more format-friendly video player than the iPod - but more on that later.

The Zen Vision:M's rechargeable battery offers up mixed performance. Creative claims only 14 hours of battery life for audio, which is behind most other players of its type of the market. Video playback, however, is substantial at four hours.

Performance
Creative has nailed that seemingly simple yet fiendishly difficult problem - ease of use -- with the Zen Vision:M. The vertical touch pad and surrounding buttons make navigation on the M extremely intuitive, and most users will be happily surfing through its various functions within minutes of first picking it up. A major plus is the context-sensitive options button, which displays different selections depending on what function you're currently using. Press it while watching a video, for example, and it will give you options for playback speed, screen size and more. Press it while listening to a song and it'll present users with music-related options. It's a nifty system that will lessen your menu backtracking. Some may find the touch pad a little too sensitive, however. As pressing down on the pad is how you confirm menu selections, there will be times when you inadvertently select something when all you wanted to do was scroll to the next option.

Sadly, Creative's music software isn't as intuitive as its player. For some weird reason, Creative has four different pieces of software that can control and interact with the Zen Vision:M. The Zen Vision:M Media Explorer is the stripped down management software, featuring a Windows Media Explorer-like façade with easily identifiable icons for ripping music, transferring files to the Zen Vision:M, converting video and more. The Zen Vision:M Media Explorer is actually quite easy and intuitive to use, and we predict most users will stick to this piece of software when using their M player. The other three programs - Creative Media Source, Creative Media Toolbox and Creative Removable Disk Manager - all handle different aspects of the Zen Vision:M's functionality. We would have preferred to see all of this bundled under one program, instead of forcing users to learn four pieces of software in order to get the most out of their player.

Thankfully, the Zen Vision:M more than makes up for this drawback by providing rock-solid performance with music, photos and movies. With a signal to noise ratio of 97dB, the player can pump it out loud without too much fuzz, and generally sounds impressive with all genres of music. As well as several preset equaliser settings, the Creative also allows users to set their own levels.

The FM radio is outstanding and, in our opinion, is superior to Apple's add-on product for the iPod, both in terms of functionality and performance. There's an impressive autoscan function that will automatically find all the stations for you and select them as presets (up to 32 can be locked in). For example, it scanned Sydney's entire FM band and found 17 stations within 20 seconds or so. Plus, you can also rename each station - press the options button and the M will take you to a keyboard layout where you can type in what the station's name is. The Zen Vision:M's recording capabilities tie in well with the radio functionality - FM radio recordings are crisp and dynamic sounding.

Photo capabilities are pretty standard, but the Creative can now also display album art. And in a neat feature that we here at CNET.com.au absolutely adore, the Zen Vision:M allows you to set your own wallpaper - even album covers can be used.

But perhaps where the Creative Zen Vision:M most outshines it rivals is with video playback. We've already talked about the impressive screen, but let us reiterate that the M's LCD is a pleasure to watch. We tested several videos and did not see any blur or picture distortion of any type. It was also quite bright, and was watchable in everything but direct sunlight. In the US, Apple has the edge on Creative when it comes to video availability thanks to the wide array of television shows available through iTunes. But until Apple gets its act together and starts offering the same level of video content to Australian consumers, Creative's Zen Vision:M is significantly ahead of the iPod thanks to its impressive list of compatible video formats (it can easily view all of the most popular types) coupled with an easy transfer process. Put simply, Zen Vision:M is the standard to beat if you're keen on watching video on your portable player.

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