Product Reviews

The fashion conscious will always plump for an Apple iPod when they're looking for an MP3 player to tote around town, but it's Creative's Zen range that's always offered more in the way of features. The new Zen Sleek Photo continues this trend, although it's really nothing more than a Zen Sleek with a colour screen.

Creative probably won't admit it, but it's clear that the old iPod Mini was the inspiration for the design of the Photo. The bulk of the case is sheathed in aluminium and any remaining exposed plastic is sturdy rather than scratch-prone. Creative still can't shake its obsession with buttons though, and while the Photo has far fewer than its previous players, there are still six and

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a touchpad to figure out the function of.

Actually, all but two of the buttons have an obvious purpose - one that that takes you up a level in the menu system and another that displays a context menu for such things as adding a track to a playlist, or saving the current playback position with a bookmark. The touchpad is a little trickier, though. This works in a similar way to the iPod's scroll wheel, but nowhere near as well. Sliding a finger along it scrolls through menus and music, tapping it makes a selection, but the touchpad is too twitchy to make this foolproof. The pad loops around the top and bottom of lists, which makes scrolling through music a hit-and-miss affair.

Like its monochrome sibling, the Photo has a built-in FM tuner and microphone for when you've exhausted its 20GB capacity or fancy recording yourself. The vibrant OLED colour screen doesn't add as much to the Photo as it does to the iPod. It's only 4.5cm from corner to corner and the 160x128 resolution is too low to do justice to the photos it can display, nor will it display album art or play video.

On the upside, the Photo sounds great - a touch better than the iPod, in fact, though you'll need a better pair of earphones than the ones Creative supplies to be able to spot the difference.