Hands-on with Creative's Zen Stone Plus
Creative has immediately followed up its release of the Zen Stone with the Zen Stone Plus. It's a new version of the cute player, this time with a screen and twice the memory capacity
With Creative's unveiling of its Zen Stone MP3 player so recently, and our review going live shortly after, we were very surprised to see a jazzed-up version released this week.
The Zen Stone Plus is a superb addition to the Zen line of players and builds on the minimalist style of its smaller sibling. We've got one in-house and we're very taken with it indeed.
At £49, this pebble-sized music player is terrific value. In addition to the original screenless Stone's feature set of, basically, just music playback, the Plus has a 64x64-pixel OLED screen, an FM radio, a voice recorder, logical folder navigation and, at 2GB, twice the storage capacity. It still feels lovely and glossy, though it's nowhere near as professional-looking as Apple's second-gen Shuffle.
Style though, isn't at the forefront of importance here. With a plethora of handy (pun intended) sports attachments, such as a wristband case that's worn with the Stone like a watch, this is a player geared towards you sport and fitness freaks. With all your constant running, weight-lifting and jog-related work-outage, having something that weighs only 21g isn't going to get in the way.
The Zen Stone Plus is out now and you can expect our full review very soon. -Nate Lanxon