Amazon.com Product Review
The Zen Micro digital music player from Creative Labs packs an incredible 5 GB of storage capacity into a shell small enough to sit comfortably in your jeans pocket. It also rides nicely in your hand, with a palm-fitting profile and thumb-friendly front-panel controls. It's a bit shorter than an Apple iPod Mini, yet its rechargeable lithium-ion battery provides 12 hours of continuous playback--50 percent more than iPod Mini's. The Zen Micro is compatible not merely with MP3s and WAV files, but with WMA as well. Toss in USB 2.0 connectivity and you're looking at one spiffy portable music player.
But playing isn't all the Zen Micro does. You can use it to receive FM radio (with 32 station presets to keep your favorites at the ready), and to record, either from the radio or from live sources such as voice dictation or lectures using the Zen Micro's built-in condenser microphone.
Trimmed in a luminescent blue glow and with easily visible backlit buttons, this stylish silver player holds up to 1,250 songs (83 hours) at 128 kbps or 2,500 songs (166 hours) at lower-fidelity 64 kbps (MP3/WMA)--that's a solid week's worth of music listening, never playing the same song twice. Compatibility with Microsoft's WMA compressed-audio format grants access to over 2 million downloadable songs offered promotionally or for sale online.
Perhaps the Zen Micro's coolest attribute is its DJ feature, which will shuffle not only all the songs you've loaded or all the songs in a given album, but, at your discretion, only the tracks you listen to most, or only those you rarely hear, taking the work out of selecting your favorites or hunting out all the music you're still getting to know.
Zen Micro's rechargeable battery is easy to replace. |
For navigation, the device features a vertical, linear touchpad designed to make searching through songs or playlists easy, quick, and fun. The unit's blue, 160 x 104-pixel, electroluminescent LCD shows key functions and song details at a glance, and you can even customize the main menu to keep right at your fingertips the features that matter most to you.
Another of the Zen Micro's handy features is its personal organizer. You'll never forget an important anniversary with the onboard calendar, and it also includes a to-do list and a contacts list, all of which sync seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook (Outlook thus required for use of these features). In addition, the device offers a sleep timer and alarm so you can drift off to sleep to the strains of one playlist and wake to a completely different one.
The Zen Micro's removable battery is easy to swap with another fully charged battery (additional batteries sold separately), extending your listening by a half-day per swap.
What's in the Box The Zen Micro player, stereo earbud headphones, a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, a USB 2.0 cable, an installation CD, a quick- start guide, and Creative MediaSource software.
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(523 customer reviews) 555 of 570 people found the following review helpful
The MP3 Player for the Rest of Us,
December 5, 2004 R. L. Lewis (Tacoma, WA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Creative Zen Micro 5 GB MP3 Player Silver (Electronics)
The Creative Zen Micro is no iPod killer. It is the iPod for the rest of us. Where Apple's product is stylish and fun to use, it has that unfortunate Apple characteristic of locking users into buying their music strictly from Apple. iTunes is a fine online music store, but there are many others and some (MSN and Musicmatch for example) are as deep in selection and easy to use. And the Creative Zen Micro gives us a player every bit as intuitive and stylish as the Apple product and the benefit of FM radio, Outlook synchronization and the use of every online music store other than iTunes.
Everyone knows that the Micro comes in an array of colors. Mine is silver. I like the blue glow and the shiny white case that compliment the silver face. Personally I think the black model looks best, but I didn't buy the unit for the color. I've seen a number of reviews of the Micro from people having trouble with the vertical touch pad. After two adjustments, I had no issues with that...Read more
814 of 874 people found the following review helpful
REVISED: If you're not an iTunes kinda person...,
October 13, 2004 Christopher Wanko "-C" (Nutley, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Creative Zen Micro 5 GB MP3 Player Black (Electronics)
... then this might intrigue you greatly. The hook with this MP3 player, distinguishing it from the others, is clearly going to be the OS applications it provides. Finally, someone has figured out that building some smarts into the player will help it compete with iPods.
The latest craze for MP3 manufacturers is the 5Gb microdrive, a 25% boost from the 4Gb ones supplied by Hitachi. At this point, the Rio Carbon is 5Gb (along with a host of South Korean manufacturers), and eventually the iPod will get a "free" upgrade to 5Gb as the 4Gb trickle down to nothing. Then what? What compels you to choose one over the other?
It has to be the UI and user experience. The Carbon is nice but offers no improvement to the near-perfect iPod experience. The scroll wheel is not an Apple innovation, but it took Apple to put it on their MP3 player for the obvious to become clear to the industry. So tack on a scroll wheel and... you still have to compete against the intuitive...Read more
41 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Comprehensive Review,
October 30, 2005 M. Le "College Purvue" (Berkeley, California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Creative Zen Micro 5 GB MP3 Player Black (Electronics)
I'm going to begin with a basic review and then as an addenum address some of the complaints on the board.
Looking for an mp3 player I was looking for (in order of priority):
1) Audio Fidelity
2) Compatibility with music subscription services
3) Build Quality
4) Portability (including batterly life)
5) Interface
6)Maintenance Costs (i.e. easily replacable, cheap battery)
With this in mind, I was led to the Zen Micro. I know creative creates great sound cards (I've had 2 of them) and I had also read that creative had the among the best fidelity of all audio players. Testing with a friend's zen micro and another's ipod, I noticed a clear difference in quality between the two using the same songs encoded at the same bitrate. I am, however, an audiophile, so many people may not notice the difference. Ipods tend to have weaker bass and less clarity.
Zen micro also had the features I was looking for that the ipod...Read more
