After following the manufactures advice and pre-installing the included software for the Creative ZEN and charging the unit for the recommended time of around 4 hours, I was set to go ahead and start using the device. The Creative ZEN was detected right away and popped up in the taskbar as a portable storage-drive; there was even an icon of the ZEN which was a bit different from what I’m used to seeing that I found was a nice touch from Creative. You can transfer your data by either two ways using the ZEN, 1; drop and drag your music files or 2; use Creative’s Media Explorer browser software which allows you to convert sync and transfer all your data in one easy action. 

By sliding the On/Off button for about 2 seconds the ZEN loads up with a big plug and fly logo of the devices name, this disappears in a matter of seconds booting the player to the basic function screens. From the every second the colour LCD screen lights up you instantly notice what an outstanding screen Creative have built-in into the ZEN. Considering the credit card size of the device you are really getting the nice LCD screen for your money, not only is the screen bigger then the ipod nano but the rich 16.7 million colour range it can produce is outstanding by the leased.

The Menu layout sections on the ZEN are pretty basic and straight forward as shown above you can really see how vibrant and clear all the colours and texts show up on the 16.7 million photo viewer display, from the bright orange, to the deep blues. Creative have based the operability to be really user friendly using larger icon logos through-out the device.

The Menu layout icons have been positioned to the right hand side of the screen, leaving the left hand side for the text recognition. This rotates in a Up and Down motion using the Direction pad to navigate to each section, then by pressing the middle OK button which enters you into the Submenu. The layout work fantastically using the images that indicate which submenu you are about to enter but I also really liked the way the right hand side of the LCD shows the user the menu above and below which allows you to quickly access your chosen submenu.

As you can see the 2.5-inch LCD produces superbly clear and sharp text using all of the 16.7 million photo viewer display, everything is instantly recognizable with bright, bold colours. On the Creative ZEN there are 8 functions available for you to enhance your device even further and they are as follows; Microphone/Music/Videos/FM Radio/Extras/Memory Card and Settings.

Browsing through the user friendly menu system responded excellently to each touch of the buttons, not once did I experience any lag in the system or recognize any slowing down while flicking through the music files or photo/music files like many other device I have reviewed in the past. The only downfall that did highlight itself to me was once I came to the end of the menu list you can’t press down again to bring you to the beginning of the menu list again, you have to press up and browse through all the menu list if you wanted to access something which is located right at the top.

Once you have made your menu selection, Creative has arranged a simple yet efficient Submenu interface. Easy to read using a bold white text which really stands out against whatever background image you choose in whatever lighting you may happen to be in. Shown above is the music Submenu section which allows you browse in a number of ways through your files; Now play, Albums, Genres, Artist…But the feature that stood out for me was the Play List section and the DJ. Firstly the Play List because it was so easy to select your favourite tunes while listening to them to add them to your play list, adding what ever name and secondly the DJ feature allows you to pick from a number of ways to play your music, for example; Most popular and Album of the day.

Once I uploaded all my music file over to the ZEN here’s what the device displays in Playback mode, as you can see all the information about your files is displayed along with any settings that you may have made to the player, like EQ mode, Clock display and so on. Your IDE tags will also display as well as a time meter bar, counting down how much of the song is left to play. Fast forward and Rew worked brilliantly on the ZEN using the time meter bar, you can see the time speeding up as you held it down for longer which is a nice touch from Creative.

A highlight for me when browsing through my Album list was I notice that Creative have included a Filter Bar that allows you to navigate through your long lists of music Alphabetically. This works by pressing right on the direction pad which brings up the filter bar instantly and makes this tack so much quicker.

The Creative ZEN supports AAC (.M4A) support along with MP3, WMA, WAVE and Audible files which you can simply drop and drag into the located folders but using the excellent ZEN media Explore software makes this task even simpler by tell the user when unsupported files are being transferred to the ZEN.

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