Creative Zen 32Gb MP3 €187 delivered

Appleblossom42 wrote: »

I have one of these but smaller size. It's nowhere near as good as the vision m as I have to convert files that the m doesn't need to. Therefore I revert back to using my husband's excellent vision m.

Thargor wrote:

Long rant, was going to make a thread about this the other day:

Do not buy the new Creative Zen whatever you do, its an utter piece of ****. The Zen Vision M is the best MP3 player ever made, drag and drop, no DRM, perfect video, perfect audio, brilliant interface, never hangs, never rejects any file, never have to convert anything and the 30GB version is going for cheap on Ebay right now, the Creative Zen is supposed to be its replacement, except they've removed so many features they've completely ****ed it up in every way possible:

- Firstly and most importantly it doesn't play video anymore, at all, even when you spend an hour converting an episode of Family Guy with the included software it still wont work, the Vision M plays absolutely everything you can throw at it without any conversion, just drag and drop, plus you can plug in an AV cable and watch it on a tv or monitor, you wont need to though because it has the best screen Ive ever seen on a player, even if you do get video working on the Zen the AV out has been removed for some reason.

- The Zen has a radio but it doesnt pick up **** anymore, I could barely get 2 stations here in poor quality, the Vision M can get everything my stereo can plus you can record the radio by just holding down the play button, they got rid of that feature in the Zen.

- The Vision M is easy to navigate in your pocket and the touchpad on it is perfect, superfast scrolling on a long list and really precise aswell, the Zen has been rotated 90 degrees and the touchpad removed so everything is in a spastic unintuitive position including the play/pause/power/volume/headphone jack etc, you have to take it out of your pocket if you want to do anything with it and if theres 200 albums in the albums folder you're going to have to press the up or down button 200 times to scroll through them:



- The menus have been ****ed up aswell, they keep reverting to their default positions, so if you listen to one song on one album and you want to press the back arrow once to go back to the list of albums like you could on the Vision M it takes you right back to the main menu and you have to scroll through all the options again and make 4 or 5 selections before you get to where you wanted to be, theres too many little annoyances like that to be listed.

Basically they've taken the best portable music device ever made and ****ed it up in every way imaginable so that now the line is no different from the millions of other generic pieces of **** flooding the market, the reason Im ranting is because when I dropped my Vision M off my bike onto the road and broke it the other day (I abused the **** out of it for years before that, they're ultra tough) Argos forced me to take a Zen as replacement because I had insurance and they dont make the Vision M anymore, I sold it on Ebay a week later because it was pissing me off too much.

The good news is Creative have released loads of perfect factory refurbished Vision Ms, theres loads on Ebay and they're total bargains, I got a 30GB one for less than what I received when I sold a 16GB Zen so I made a small profit in the end and Ill still be able to trade it in in Argos in a couple of years time because I insured the Zen before I sold it and hopefully they wont be able to tell the difference.