Introduction

It’s an iPod world; I might as well acknowledge that from the start. But that isn’t stopping other manufacturers from coming out with their own ideas for digital audio players, with hopes of prying some precious market share from Apple’s death grip.

Creative Labs is one of those other manufacturers, and one of its more recent attempts is the Zen Vision:M, a hard disk-based portable digital media player designed to go after Apple’s successful full-size iPod. Like the iPod, it fits in your average coat or pants pocket and has enough disk capacity to hold an average person’s entire music library with plenty of space for videos and photos, so no matter where you are, you’ll always have your tunes (and pics and flicks).

Overview

The Creative Zen Vision:M (ZVM) is no slouch. It has all the features one would expect from a player in its class: it comes in 30GB and 60GB models; has a big, bright LCD screen; can play music, photos and videos in most of the popular formats; and includes extras such as an FM tuner with recorder, voice recording, a personal organizer, and podcast and audiobook support. It can also output to a TV set for big-screen viewing.

For navigation, the ZVM uses a three-way vertical scroll-pad with left and right directional buttons flanking it and four function buttons surrounding the entire arrangement. The only other control is a power/hold switch on the top of the player, next to its headphone jack. The bottom of the player features a dock connector, which connects to your PC’s USB 2.0 port using the included dongle.

Getting content onto the ZVM can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. At its heart, the ZVM is a PlaysForSure player that works over Microsoft’s Media Transfer Protocol (MTP). This Windows-only protocol lets you use any MTP-aware software application to transfer music to it, including a couple supplied by Creative. No drivers are required; just plug in and go.

Battery life for the ZVM is respectable at 14 hours for music and 8 hours for video on one full charge. It can charge in about 6 hours over USB, or as little as 2.5 hours using an optional power cable.

First Impressions

Upon opening the box, it’s hard not to immediately compare the ZVM to the 5th generation iPod. It’s got the same form factor and the same gorgeous large LCD screen at the top with navigation below. The devices are similar in size as well, with the ZVM being somewhat thicker. They both have the same gentle rounded corners and clean, minimalist faces. In fact, if not for the iPod’s signature Click Wheel and the ZVM’s vertical touch pad, one would be hard-pressed to tell them apart. As it is, a less tech-savvy person could be forgiven for assuming the ZVM is actually some different model of iPod.

Is it a new iPod? No, it’s a Zen.

The ZVM feels solid and comfortable, if a little heavy in the hand. Buttons are nice and big and give a definite tactile click when depressed, ensuring ease of use even through thick gloves. The touchpad itself is equally big, dominating the lower half of the player’s face, with built-in rocker switches off to its sides. The rocker buttons are a little tricky to hit without activating the touchpad by accident, but it only takes a couple of minutes to get used to it.

The screen itself is a fingerprint magnet that practically demands some sort of screen protection, but all complaints cease when one turns the device on and the screen comes to life. Put simply, it’s gorgeous, and very, very bright. At a resolution of 320x240, the 2.5-inch screen is sharp and clear. The menus look fine, but where this screen shines is displaying photos and videos. They practically pop off the screen. Viewing angles aren’t that great, but who cares—you’re going to be staring at the screen head-on anyway.

Finding and playing content

It’s hard to talk about the ZVM’s interface without comparing it almost directly to that of the iPod, which is a little weird considering Creative invented it. But anyone who is even remotely familiar with the iPod interface will feel right at home with the ZVM. A succession of menus let you drill down to find the content you’re looking for.

The thumbpad is the primary means of navigating through the menus. In each menu, you move your thumb up and down the thumbpad to select an option, and then tap the center of the thumbpad to activate it. Some longer lists, such as the Artist list, give you an alphabetical index on the right hand side of the screen; press Right on the thumbpad to use it, scroll down to the desired letter, then press Left to go back to the main menu and choose your artist or album. Pressing the top or bottom of the touchpad lets you scroll rapidly through the list, with the scrolling getting faster and faster as time goes on. Once you’ve found the music track you are looking for, selecting it will bring up a menu asking if you want to play it immediately or add it to the current playlist. I like that feature a lot, because it is much more discoverable than the iPod’s On-The-Go playlist feature.

Four of the six themes available

Four buttons surround the thumbpad: a Play/Pause button, a Menu button, a Back button and a Quick Shortcut button, and for the most part, they act as you would expect. The Menu button brings up a contextual menu and the Quick Shortcut button lets you quickly switch to your favorite feature: if you like browsing albums, configure it to jump to your Album list; if you prefer it to pick something for you, configure it to jump to the Zen DJ mode. The Quick Shortcut button is just one of the ways you can customize your ZVM’s UI. You can remove and add entries to the Main Menu (such as putting the Removable Disk option right up front), you can select one of six color themes for the UI (including a very iPod-like “Pearl White” theme) and you can use any photo as wallpaper.

The Zen DJ mode is unique to the Zen. It lets you choose from a number of automatic playlists, which the ZVM compiles based on your listening habits. It has four playlists: Album of the Day, Random Play All, Most Popular, and Rarely Heard. It gets your listening data not just from the device itself, but also from your computer (depending on the software you use to manage your music.) It would be nice to see more options from the list, such as genre, year or rating-specific options. As it is, the Zen DJ is fairly useless, but it is a nice feature to have.

When you’ve found something to play, the ZVM displays track, album and artist data on screen, with a seek bar at the bottom, album art to the left, song count at the top left and play mode at the top right. It’s pretty much identical to what the iPod shows on its screen during playback. Tapping the center of the touchpad lets you assign a rating to the current track, and also lets you view and manage the current playlist. You can move and delete tracks on the fly, and when you are happy with it, you can save it for later. This is a great feature, and it’s implemented very well, but unfortunately, playlists saved this way don’t get uploaded back to the computer on the next sync.

Playback quality is up to Creative’s usual high standards. It’s nearly impossible to get it to distort, even at maximum volume. Much depends on your headphones, but the ZVM provides enough oomph to drive most consumer headphones, with bass that makes itself known without overwhelming the midrange. The ZVM provides a limited set of EQ and Bass Boost options, as well as a smart volume normalizer and limiter to help optimize the audio.

Playback controls are logical, if a little awkward. The Play/Pause button is self-explanatory. Skipping tracks is accomplished by pressing left or right on the touchpad, and seeking is done by holding those same buttons. The awkward part comes because, again, it’s somewhat tricky to hit those left and right buttons. Also, as you seek, it gets faster and faster, making it needlessly tricky to find the point in the song you’re looking for. Moving up and down on the touchpad adjusts the volume.

Photo browsing and viewing are handled much as you would expect, with the thumbpad used to browse your photo folders and thumbnails. Thumbnails are fairly slow to come up, taking almost 2 seconds per picture in the first pass. Thankfully, the player caches the thumbnails, making them much faster on subsequent browsing sessions, but it’s still a pain waiting for each thumbnail to come up that first time. As you’re browsing, music will continue to play, letting you set up a decent slideshow.

Video playback pretty much works the same way, except that playback stops if you leave the video screen. It does remember where you left off though, so you can resume later, and you can manually set bookmarks, which is a nice touch. The ZVM doesn’t have any trick-play features; you can pause or seek. That’s it.

The ZVM also supports Podcasts, or ZENcasts as it calls them. The problem with ZENcasts is that it treats every ZENcast as a video, even if it is an audio-only podcast. They are found under the Video menu, and they play exactly like videos. Video podcasts will of course show the video feed, but audio podcasts will put the show name, episode, logo and a brief synopsis (taken from the XML description of the show) on screen in a looping slideshow. The problem with this is the player thinks it’s video, so it won’t turn off the screen even if you turn on the hold switch and put it in your pocket. This results in greatly diminished battery life while playing audio podcasts. Podcasts are also not well-named in menus; instead of seeing show names and descriptions, you’ll see oddly cryptic filenames that will take a few moments to decipher. It also doesn’t indicate what you have already listened to. It’s a serviceable podcasting implementation, but it needs some refinement.

With all the content available right on the device, it’s a little hard to imagine wanting to listen to the radio, but if you want to, the ZVM’s FM Radio feature is fairly easy to use. It allows you to store up to 32 station presets, and will automatically scan the FM dial looking for stations the first time you use it. Reception is solid, with all of my favorite local channels coming in as clearly as one can reasonably expect. The ZVM also allows you to make recordings of FM content, which are stored as mono 64kb MP3 files and are not uploaded to the computer. It’s somewhat disappointing that Creative didn’t include some trick-play functions for the radio, such as pausing live radio, and it’s even more disappointing that it doesn’t support RDS to show album and artist information on-screen during FM reception.

Software

These days, the software you use to manage your player’s content is as important as the player itself. Creative’s software offerings are something of a mixed bag, mainly because there are so many of them.

• Two applications are dedicated to managing the music on your player: Zen Vision Media Explorer and Creative Media Source. The Zen Explorer lets you drag and drop your music to folders on the player, much like you would any other external hard drive, whereas Media Source is a complete iTunes-style music management application.
• A third app, Creative Media Toolkit, converts video from a number of different formats to WMV format for transfer to the Zen. The ZVM does provide native support for WMV, DivX, Xvid and MPEG 1, 2 and 4, but other formats such as QuickTime Sorensen and H.264 must be converted first.
• A fourth application, Creative Sync Manager, runs all the time and synchronizes your music, video, ZENcasts, photos, address book, and calendar.
• And finally, Creative ZENcast Manager is designed to download and update your podcasts and videocasts.

ZENcast Organizer collects podcasts
and transfers them to the Zen.

Creative’s applications are, in a word, awful. Just the fact that there are so many of them is unfortunate, without considering the fact that they are all bloated, buggy messes with horrible UIs. Nine times out of ten, Zen Explorer crashes when I open it, and Media Source isn’t much better. The other applications crash somewhat less frequently, but that isn’t saying much. When they aren’t crashing, they are showing cryptic status messages, taking up too much screen real-estate, hogging memory and generally misbehaving in any way they can.

Thankfully, you aren’t limited to Creative’s software. Because the ZVM is a Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) device, there are a bevy of applications that can put music on it, like Windows Media Player 10 or higher, Napster, Yahoo Jukebox, MusicMatch and more. Any of these applications will perform better than Creative’s apps, and Creative even includes Windows Media Player and Yahoo! Jukebox in the package. Unfortunately, you are forced to use Creative’s applications if you want to put ZENcasts or organizer data on the ZVM. Also, if you aren’t on Windows, you are pretty much out of luck, since MTP is a Windows-only protocol.

Because the ZVM is an MTP device, it separates the media you want to play from the rest of your data. It lets you allocate a certain amount of space to use as a USB Mass Storage device in increments up to 16GB. You have to choose the “Removable Disk” option from the player’s menu in order to use it this way, however. Any media files uploaded this way will not be playable on the device, nor will any playable media be accessible this way. But it is a very useful feature to have.

PlaysForSure

Its worth mentioning how the ZVM works as a PlaysForSure device. It works, in a word, flawlessly. It’s nigh impossible to get this player to deny you access to content that you are entitled to, which is a marked improvement over earlier PlaysForSure players that would block access to your songs if you even looked at them funny. Syncing content onto the player using Windows Media Player, Yahoo or Napster is painless (though not necessarily quick), and you can even copy media off the player onto your PC. Music and video from different libraries and online stores can be mixed and matched with impunity, and nothing is lost unless you explicitly delete it. You can download rental or purchased videos from stores like CinemaNow and Movielink onto this device to watch on the go, and subscription music stores work very well.

The player supports WMA, MP3 and WAV audio formats. It’s disappointing that it doesn’t have OGG or FLAC support, nor does it have AAC support. But these are not deal-breakers.

Final thoughts

What we have here in an excellent player that does a great job giving you access to your media on the go, with an intuitive UI and features that help you sort through it all. It could use a few improvements in its podcasting support, but on the whole, it is fast and easy to use. The same cannot be said for the desktop software it comes with, though. From near-constant crashes to unintelligible dialog boxes and a confusing UI in general, Creative’s software is simply a train wreck. Luckily, you can avoid it almost entirely in favor of more reliable and usable music management software from other vendors, a couple of which are included.

The Creative Zen Vision:M is a worthy competitor to the iPod. It may not be as thin and sexy as the iPod, but it is every bit as capable, and it will impress your iPod-toting friends. If you can tolerate using Creative’s abysmal software package, you will be very happy with this device.