The Creative Zen of Digital Media Players : The Zen Of Digital Media Players?
- 1. The Zen Of Digital Media Players?
- 2. Look & Feel
- 3. Shifting Media To The Promised Land
1. The Zen Of Digital Media Players?
In my decades long experience in the technology field I have found that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, better for producing exciting, innovative and quality new products than a major rivalry between two big companies.
Sure it may mean that not everybody will play nice all of the time, a la Microsoft and Netscape or AMD and Intel, but is that really a bad thing? Generally speaking, when there is a technology arms race, the real winners are consumers. More innovation as well as price wars tend to keep the players on their feet and the consumer happy.
In parallel with the browser and chip wars, two opposing titans of the business, Apple and Creative, drive innovation in the field of handheld multimedia players. Creative originally entered the MP3 space before Apple, but it was the iPod that really exploded the multimedia market and brought it into the mainstream.
While Apple has managed to produce and sell more than double the amount of iPod's compared to Creative's media players, the audio giant has not been hesitant to come down the mountain with its own offerings. The Zen Vision:M represents Creative's latest attempt to take on the iPod, and was specifically designed to serve as an alternative to the latest generation of video iPods.
On paper the Vision:M certainly looks impressive when compared to the competition, leading with a similarly-sized 2.5", 320x240 resolution screen that goes on to trounce the iPod's 65,536 on-screen colors with 262,144 of its own.
Unlike the iPod, which comes in both 60 GB and 30 GB variants, the Zen Vision:M only comes in a 30 GB flavor, but that shouldn't be a deal breaker for most people. It makes up for the lack of size variety with far more format support: the Vision:M will play MPEG-4, WMV, Motion JPEG, DivX and XviD videos out of the box to the iPod's singular MPEG-4 video support.
Creative also promises four hours of video playback to the video iPod's rather stingy two hours, a claim we investigate below. As well as video the Vision:M doubles up as an audio player, picture viewer, FM radio, voice recorder and, should you need it to fulfill the rather eclectic role, a personal organizer.
- Next page Look & Feel
Creative-ZEN-Vision-Multi-Media-Player 60 Gig, well what can I say, I thought this is just what I wanted only to find what a letdown. I first purchased mine last July and I thought this is fantastic it lived up to all the press on in then I started to notice things like it kept stalling so I took everything off it and formatted the HD again it seems to go ok for a while.
I went on holiday with it thinking I will have all the music I need, then something happened with it. The screen started to break up in the end it went all together. I had a massive problem with creative, then were quite slow in replying to my emails. I had the 60 gig unit and they offered me a brand new one but only a 30 Gig which I thought this is quite strange. I did ask then at the time is there a problem with the 60 Gig units? They just say no we can get you a new one but its going to take longer.
Looking back now I should have taken their offer up as they had repaired my player and this last week its started again the screens stating to go again. I don’t know if there was a manufacturing problem with the Creative-ZEN-Vision-Multi-Media-Player 60 Gig but you don’t see them advertised and I went into comet and they said as fair as they know they have stopped making them and the ones they did have were recalled,
If anyone else has has the same problems they it might be good to know this