Several years ago I wanted to purchase a digital music player. I wasn't one to become one of the millions of iPod lemmings, so I looked far and wide for the best digital music solution out there. At that time I purchased a Creative Labs Zen Xtra. It had the size (40 or 60GB), replaceable battery (iPod eat your heart out), and played a file format that I thought was better than MP3 - namely WMA. Read more here to understand this position.
The Zen Xtra has served me well. My 40GB model can hold just about my entire music collection (sampled at a high bitrate), has a decent battery drain time, and ultimately sounds great. It's only drawback was that it is a little large - about the size of an old Sony Walkman (remember those - the tape player, not the CD player). But this was a price I was willing to pay for these feature.
Of course time marches on, and technology improves. There are much better players out there now. While the price point has remained about the same, they have gotten smaller and now have the ability to store/view pictures and movies. As I am currently in the market for a new digital music player, I of course when looking at the latest Creative Labs offerings. I've examine two in particular: the Zen Vision:M and the Zen V.
On the surface these look like solid products, and when held against the current iPods they indeed are. The problem as I see it is that to take on the iPod, you have to not only meet the iPod's specs, but surpass them - and by a significant margin.
The two biggest features I hold in the highest regard are the player's music capacity and if it has a replaceable battery. I travel quite a bit, and I like to take my entire music collection with me. I just never know what I may be in the mood for, so it's good to have my collection with me. And because I travel, I also tend to run the player for a long time - listening to music for hours, or trying to get through a book-on-tape or my language CDs in one sitting. When your cruising at 40,000 feet, the options for recharging your player are limited. Just give me an extra battery and I'm good to go.
So what then happened with both these features? Creative Labs in its wisdom has chosen to reduce the capacities on their players (30GB is the largest Vision:M you can get), and it looks like they have dumped the idea of a replaceable battery all together - none of their new players have them.
Ouch. Time to look for another company's player...
Eric Marlow
aka "Snacko"
