DesignTechnica Reviews the Creative Zen Micro

[James Fee]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review2180.html' target='_blank'>http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review2180.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Creative Labs has a couple problems they need to address before they can stand to compete with others in this market. First of all, something is draining the battery life from its player at increased rates, both when it’s being used and when it’s powered off. Getting four hours of battery life from a 12-hour battery is inexcusable. Secondly, while we love the audio quality from their ear buds, they are too big to use for long periods and will make your ears very sore. Lastly, Creative needs to polish their own MediaSource software and work on software compatibility with other Media Players like RealPlayer and MusicMatch. Here is our suggestion for Creative Labs: make a hard drive based digital audio player with only a few polished features and make sure it works well. Throwing in everything but the kitchen sink shouldn’t automatically mean it’s the best, it has to work correctly first."</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/zen_micro_colors.jpg" /> <br /><br />If Creative really wants to overtake Apple as the leader of the digital music player world, they'll have to do a much better job. The only thing holding back WMA from being THE standard is the hardware. The Zen Micro is a huge advance from previous attempts, but it appears to fall short.

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

How did they get 4 hours? That's really not right.

[Kevin & Beth Remhof]

The only thing holding back WMA from being THE standard is the hardware.

Personally, I'm a bit disenfranchised with WMA. I upgraded my processor at home a couple of months ago. It took two weeks to get all of my DRMed WMA files back. Blech. If those files had been iTunes tracks, it would have much been easier to get them back.

Now, don't get me wrong. WMA sounds great, even at low bit rates. I'm just a little gun-shy right now.

[klinux]

I was enamored wtih WMA9 for a while before going with iTunes and AAC but now neither. iTunes is cool and all that and uses XML for its DB of tracks but is a pain in the butt when two people want to share and udpate the same library or if you want to join two libraries.

Sorry for the offtopic rant!

[David Horn]

I'm surprised they criticised it about the lack of separate volume control when the mini has exactly the same system. However, it's put me off getting one for the time being.

[Neil Enns]

My wife just got a Zen Micro and it turns out if track names are too long they'll cause a bulk music transfer to the device to fail. It's really frustrating, she'll put 15 songs in the queue to go, and it'll hit one with a long name and bail. Really an inexcusable bug if you ask me!

Neil