Creative Zen V Plus 2 Gig

So here we are, the first actual post to my new Blog about technology. Now I know that I said I would try to have a breaking story from the folks over at Microsoft’s Business Unit who handle the Mac side of things. The only problem is that the contact that I had for them wasn’t able to get me the story I wanted. So instead, today is going to be my first product review.

The Creative Labs Zen V Plus 2 Gig MP3 Player is a nice little unit. I have been using a Creative Zen MP3 player for years, I happen to own the 30 Gig version of the Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra from several years back. There have been vast improvements on the players, though I think they are really in different categories. Where as my old Zen player actually uses a laptop hard drive for storage, and therefore is rather large, the new Zen V is much smaller and uses a solid-state flash drive as its storage media. I picked this unit up for $79.99 from the local Yellow Tag store. For the price, it has the largest capacity and the most features.

Features:
2 Gig Storage Capacity
MP3, WMA, WMA DRM Playback
Video Playback
FM Tuner
Voice Recorder
Picture Viewer
1” OLED Screen

Now there are several things that I really like about this product. The screen size is pretty good, and the color is pretty good as well. You wouldn’t want to watch a movie on it, but for short little clips it isn’t too bad. Pictures displayed on it are the same way, not Hi-Res, but decent. The Voice recorder on it is ok, but it does have a line-in recording feature so you could use a headset or mic to record instead of the built in Microphone, which picks up a lot of ambient noise. The FM Tuner seems to work pretty well and as long as you have a clear signal, the sound quality is just as good as you get out of a digital tuner in your car. The entire unit fits in the palm of your hand, and I mean the fleshy part, not including your fingers, it is somewhat reminiscent of the old Tamagotchi, except you don’t need to feed this. It also charges via USB, however the associates at the Yellow Tag store said they also make a wall charger for it. It is suppose to come in three color combinations; Black/Green, White/Green, Pink/White, however the store I was at only had the Black/Green model.

Overall, for the price, this little unit takes my vote. Other similar devices with similar features run from $89.99-$109.99, depending on maker, not including the iPods. So I think the Creative Zen V Plus 2 Gig gets you the best bang for the buck.

That is it for my first review, let me know what you think, or give me other ideas for products to review. Have a great day.