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.