14 DAY TRIAL // The people at Creative have tried time and time again to come up with a portable media player that will end the iPods' supreme reign over this specific market segment. However, despite the fact that their products provided some rather interesting features, they simply couldn't compete against Apple's marketing power and this is the reason why the iPod is still the market leader. Nevertheless, Creative simply doesn't want to give up and this is exactly the reason why they've launched yet another "hitman", simply called ZEN, whose purpose is, obviously, to compete against the Video iteration of Apple's player.
Thus, the ZEN is a credit card-sized music, video and photo player, which has been fitted with a large 2.5-inch display that supports up to 16.7 million colors. Moreover, the player's ZEN user interface has an upgraded look for an enhanced visual experience, enabling more information to be viewed on the screen. The Creative ZEN also includes a built-in FM radio with 32 station presets, a voice recorder, an SD memory slot for additional storage, as well as a personal organizer to sync contacts, to do lists and calendar to Microsoft Outlook.
However, perhaps the most important selling point of the new ZEN model (and the best reason why the iPod Video should be a little worried) is the fact that the player supports AAC music and unprotected iTunes Plus tracks from the iTunes store, in addition to MP3 and WMA formats. Moreover, the device is compatible with some of the most popular portable multimedia formats, including WMV9, MJPEG, MPEG4-SP, DivX 4/5 and XviD.
"The Creative ZEN immediately gets your attention because it has the same size screen as our award-winning Creative ZEN Vision:M, but it's so much smaller, lighter and thinner," said Craig McHugh, president of Creative Labs Inc. "With the vibrant 2.5-inch screen, you can now have a great video watching or photo viewing experience with a very compact player."
The new Creative ZEN will become available (at least in Singapore) in September, in three storage "flavors": 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB. The portable media players will retail for around $249, $349 and $499 respectively, which are not exactly extremely high price tags, but, on the other hand, they're not low enough to represent quite a real threat for the iPod Video.
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