It’s been a week since I got my Creative Zen Vison: M (Firmware version 1.40.02). If you don’t want to read the whole article I guess the headline speaks for itself. I will walk you through each and every function over here and tell you why and how it kicks the ipod’s ass.

Specifications:
Dimension: 62mm X 104mm X 19mm
Weight: 166g
Capacity: 30 GB (28565 MB Usable)
Screen: 2.5’’ 262,144 color



Features:
Music Player
Video Player (Including DIVX and XVID)
Photo Viewer
Fm Player/Recorder
Microphone (Voice Recorder)
Organizer (Date & Time/ Tasks/ Contacts)

Switching On:

The player starts up in 3.67 seconds, this is when you are awitching it on after a previous switch on. The first switch on is rather long around 10 seconds and if u have music playing while you switch it off the moment you switch it on the music begins to play again even before the screen comes on. (approx one sec)

Buttons:

Apart from the normal on/off/hold button on top the creative has 5 other buttons, 1 customizable button and touch pad. To select anything and scroll the menu use the vertical touch pad just like a laptop pad except no left right on the touch pad there are 2 buttons along the side of the touchpad.

Syncing with Windows:

The first problem I had with this player that got me frustrated with it is that after installing the drivers and even after recognizing the player the creative media explorer showed the player as not connected.

After browsing through a few forums I found the answer. All you have to do is delete the player from the hardware device manager and restart your pc. Windows will then detect it and do the needful.

First pro point, right click on any file and send to creative zen vision m. No need of using the software provided to send your files to the player. Now that we have got the player loaded up lets take a look at some of the play back features.

Music:

Sound quality is equal to if not better than the ipod. I will not get into the comparatives on quality as I do not have a 5th Gen Ipod Video to compare it to but I have heard and used the Ipod Nano as well as the Mini.

You can choose to play songs from a playlist, by album, artist, genre, all tracks, recordings, bookmarked songs (which means there is a function to bookmark music) and one of the good features is the DJ selection which allows you to either randomly play all the tracks, automatically play the least heard tracks, automatically play the most heard tracks or the album of the day (Randomly chooses one album and plays it)

Now we go to the now playing menu, click on the options and we get a seek to button, which allows you to either move forward or backward in track. Next is the bookmark option, then the view details of the track that shows you the track no, name, artist, album name, genre, which year, duration, play count (how many times the songs played) and finally the encoding of the song. Next is lookup artist that will show you all the songs n the player by that artist, then remove song, save as playlist, play mode (normal, repeat track, repeat all, shuffle, shuffle repeat, track once) then the purchase this which connects to windows media player to buy the cd and finally the volume.

While a song is playing you can also rate the song up to 5 stars, (but unfortunately there’s no feature to sort songs by rating) you can increase the volume by just moving your finger up or down on the touch pad and by pressing the shortcut button (which is customizable to execute any feature or open any menu item) you can shuffle all songs and play them.

Video:



The video quality is fantastic I am serious I was surprised when I saw the quality myself. I never expected to watch movies on it but last night I just watched saw. The bundled software picks up codec’s from the computer and converts any video file to a format and size the player understands. You can also connect it to you TV to play the videos on it at 640 x 480 but I haven’t done it as the cable to do so doesn’t come in the bundle.

While playing the video you can increase the volume the same way while playing music i.e. using the touch pad. The various options you have while playing the video are to seek to a certain part. But it gets rather annoying using the touchpad to fast forward to a certain part in a movie as it doesn’t play while forwarding or reversing. But the next option takes care of the forwarding part, it’s the set playback speed option. In this option it allows you to play a video at 3 faster speeds. On the third speed you can move 28 mins in a video in 30 seconds while watching it of course.
Next options are fit to screen, stretch to full, original size and then volume.

Photos

Under photos you can have slideshows, pictures (which leads to the folders) and recently browsed photos. You can choose the transition affect from moving from one folder to the other such as fade move left etc.
Rotate, Zoom In, Rate picture, Next Rated Picure to view (Should start this feature in music) View Details, Delete, set the picture as a wallpaper, start slideshow, set slide interval and jump to picture settings in menu.

Menu System:

The player has a very easy to use user interface and the best part of it you can customize the menu to show or hide any section or part of it. The player has an option of hiding content you don’t want people to see and it can be seen by putting in a password.

Settings:

Audio:
Play Mode (normal, repeat track, repeat all, shuffle, shuffle repeat, track once)
Equalizer (8 Pre set modes + 1 Custom Mode)
Smart Volume (Which keeps the volume same through every track)
Bass Boost (Used only for testing/ Insane Base levels)

Photo/Video:
Slide Interval Time (3 sec, 5sec, 10 sec, 15 sec)
Slide Transition (None, Uncover Left, Uncover Right, Uncover Down, Uncover Up, Fade, Random)
Video Out (Off, NTSC, PAL)



Display Settings:
Configure Menu (Add remove portions of the menu)
Backlight Timer (5, 10, 15, 30 seconds)
Brightness (10 – 100%)
Themes Marine Blue, Sable Black, Ice Blue, Forest Green, Candy Pink and Pearl White
Reset Wallpaper

Player Settings:
Owner ~~friedclyde~~
Idle Shutdown (off, 5, 10, 15, 30 mins)
Sleep Timer (off, 15, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120 mins)
Touchpad (Clicker On/Off Sensitivity Low/Medium/High)
My Shortcut Button (Customized to jump anywhere in the player settings/menu)
Protected Content: Show/Hide
Protected Content Password (Set/ Reset Password)
Clock Settings:
View Clock (Full screen clock with time and date)
Clock in Title (On/Off)
Set Alarm
Language (around 10 plus languages)
Reset settings (Gets back all the changes you made to default.)

Functionality:

Well I have not heard the FM Radio and I doubt I will ever use this feature so its not included in my menu cause I removed it ha ha. The microphone recording quality is good and it shows you the volume levels while recording on the screen. Shutdown time is a little less than 5 seconds.

There is a place to put in a pin at the bottom of the player to reset it where the USB doc goes in. It charges through USB and takes around 3and a half hours for a full charge when it’s off. The box claims a four hour battery life and 14 hour music life with one charge. I use it while I travel for around 3 hours a day that is music and watch a movie in the night while I sleep. I have to charge it every 2 days, the battery life is killer. You can also buy a power adapter to charge it.



It gets a little tricky to use the touch pad but once you get used to working with it, it’s a blessing. The player is lightning fast even with it filled up to the brim. The only time when there is a lag when I go to the artists lists, that’s probably cause I have a list of more than a 1000 artists. Another great feature is instead of scrolling from one artist/track/album to another you can also scroll alphabetically increasing the search speed.

Conclusion:

More features and a better battery life than the ipod, exceptional output quality at a price just a wee bit more that the ipod photo the creative zen is a winner over the ipod. I would give it a five star rating. The best part creative keeps updating the firmware to include more features. On a one to one comparison it takes a no brainer to figure out which one of them is better than the other.

Once again I hope you guys enjoyed your read, and remember don’t go with the flow but flow with the go.

Update the Zen Vision M Firmware