Product Reviews

Video playback is slowly making its way on to more MP3 players. Last month we reviewed the flash memory-based iRiver U10 - see our Hotlist below. Creative's Zen Vision:M is a full-size hard disk player that competes directly with the 30GB iPod Video.

'Full-size' seems an appropriate adjective for the Vision:M. While the iPod is 1.1cm thick and weighs 136g, the Zen player measures almost 2cm and weighs 164g. Even next to the 60GB iPod, which is 1.4cm thick, it feels unfashionably bulky.

Creative supplies the Zen with white earbud headphones, which sound acceptable but produce a slightly muffled sound. They have thicker driver units than others we've tested and feel big and uncomfortable in the ear.

Although Creative has improved this player's controls, it's still one of our least-favourite systems. None of the stiffly

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sprung buttons seems to be where you'd expect them. Rocking the touch pad navigates left and right through songs, making room for a new short cut button that always seems to be "not applicable here".

The Vision:M displays photos and video on its 6.3cm colour screen. The display's large area and high quality make it a surprisingly adept photo viewer, although we found the player's touch-sensitive scroll bar clumsy when browsing photo folders. The Vision:M supports a wider range of video formats than the iPod and will even play DivX-encoded AVI files. It identifies itself to Windows as a Portable Media Device, so you can copy music and photos using Windows Explorer. We had some problems copying video content, but we solved these by installing Creative's bundled Media Explorer software.

Copying 500MB of music files to the player took just one minute and 15 seconds. Creative says the Zen's battery will last for 14 hours of music playback, but it switched off after nine hours and 59 minutes when playing a mixture of MP3 and WMA files, and managed slightly less when we repeated the test.

This player's biggest problem is its similarity to the highly desirable iPod. The Zen's video playback support is better implemented and its Plays For Sure certification means you'll have more freedom when buying music online, but it doesn't have the iPod's style, battery life or desirability, and it costs £30 more.