Product Reviews

From the bumper crop of white headphone cables in the streets that surround the Buyer offices, it looks like Apple's iPod cropped up in a lot of letters to Santa last Christmas.

The Zen Micro is Creative's riposte to our current Best Buy MP3 player, the iPod Mini. A lot of effort has clearly been put into making it look as pretty as Apple's products, and it has paid off. The pocket-sized, curved unit fits nicely in the hand, and the controls on the front glow an appealing blue. The translucent white back (with a finish reminiscent of an iPod) slides off to allow quick battery changes, like a mobile phone. If you're not keen on the powder blue front on our review unit here, there are nine more colours to choose from.

On paper, the Zen Micro has a lot of benefits over the iPod Mini. It provides an extra gigabyte of storage, giving you a total of 5GB (enough to store around 2,500 tracks). It also

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has a battery life of about 12 hours, as opposed to the Mini's eight. The Micro also has a built-in FM tuner and supports WMA files, the main rival to the better-known MP3 format. This means you can buy songs from a wider variety of online music stores (you may need to update the Micro's built-in software), although it won't work with the iTunes Music Store.

The collection of software used to manage music and the player isn't quite as smooth as iTunes, but it works fairly well. It took us a few goes to get the player to synchronise with a PC, and we couldn't get its contacts backup function to work.

The controls are the Micro's biggest weakness. The touchpad at the front is no match for the iPod scrollwheel. You're supposed to slide your finger on it to scroll, and tap to select a track or option, but it's too easy to inadvertently select when you meant to scroll. Picking a track from a long list is slower, too. The other controls - flat, touch-sensitive areas rather than clickable buttons - sometimes respond only after a couple of taps.

The Micro's sound quality is good (provided you replace the original headphones, which distort bassy tracks at high volume). The FM radio reception is variable, and it's hard to get a decent signal for some stations.

The iPod Mini is still the best choice for a compact MP3 player. The Zen Micro's support for the popular WMA format and its built-in FM tuner are both useful - but the fiddly controls mean we can't recommend it.