Creative Zen

[ Music ] ^M00:00:01 >> Hi I'm Jasmine France, senior associate editor for CNET.com and I'm here today with a brand new creative Zen MP3 player. Now this little bit of a departure, there is no sir name, no N, no plus, no V, none of that. This is just the Creative Zen. And this will actually be replacing the Zen Vision M, which means Creative will no longer be making hard drive MP3 players. That may sadden some people, but you'll be happy to know that this is a quite capable player to replace it. As you can see, it's nice and small. It has the same 2 point 5 inch color screen as the Vision M did, but you have a much smaller body. They got rid of the touch strip; you just have the five way control pad here. Beneath this, you have the play pause key and a short cut button which you can assign to various functions. Then you have your back key and a contextual menu button. I like that there are plenty of controls on the front for doing everything that you need to do with the player. On the side you have the standard mini USB port, a power and hold switch and the standard 3 point 5 millimeter headphone jack for use of your favorite headphones. And then finally one other physical characteristic of the player, you have an SD card slot built right into the top. Now this is something that we haven't really seen in Creative players before. And I think it was really necessary with this player because it is being built as an MP3 player and video player. And since it only goes up to 16 gigabytes I think it's important to have the memory expansion so that if there's people that want to carry a lot of media on here, you still have that option. As with all Creative players, this one has plenty of features for you. You get your standard audio play back MP3, WMA, including subscription and Creative even added AAC support so you can playback unprotected AAC files from iTunes. Which is a great feature. You also get photo playback and video playback. It supports a variety of video formats. We've always liked that with Creative players. And there's an FM radio with several presets and an auto tuner and a voice recorder. Now the pricing on this is going to be a little bit higher than what you've seen with the Zen B Plus. There's a 4 gigabyte version for 149, an 8 gigabyte version for 199 and for those who need the most memory, you can get a 16 gigabyte version, but it is going to cost you about 300 dollars for that version. Now Creative is also going to offer a variety of accessories for the player. There is the neoprene armband here which will go for about 20 dollars. It has the built in controls and it is sweat proof here. There's also a leather case which will go for about 25. Three pack of silicone cases which will be black, red and blue. These have belt clips built in. That three pack will go for 20 dollars. And then finally you have the clear acrylic hard case which has the carabineer attached and it also has this handy little kickstand for propping it up while you're viewing the player. I think that's quite nice. This will also go for about 20 dollars. I'm Jasmine France and this has been the Creative Zen. ^M00:02:43 [ Music ]