Creative Zen V Plus Review
A seamless integration of design and functionality. Your music and your life now fit perfectly in the ZEN V Plus. Enjoy a full suite of entertainment in a petite design - loads of music, full color photos, FM radio and view short video clips. Small is the new beautiful.
Scratch resistant OLED screen
Small and trendy, ZEN V Plus features a brilliant full color 1.5" OLED display. Your photos are clearer and more vibrant than ever, thanks to its 128 x 128 resolution.
Line-in encoding
No computers necessary. Record music directly from your CD player or other playback source with the supplied Line-In cable instantly, in few simple steps.
Your lifestyle tool
ZEN V Plus does much more than play music or display photos. Use it to display the time, as a handy alarm clock, or even to view your calendar, tasks and contacts. Maximize it as an external storage device that stores your important files and documents.
One touch navigation joystick
Its ergonomically designed 5-way joystick enables easy access to all menus. You can even start voice recording with just a click of a button.
Set your tone
ZEN V Plus comes with 8 presets and custom EQ settings to bring out the best in your music.
Easy transfer
Simple drag and drop your data files between ZEN V Plus and your computer. No complicated or messy driver installations necessary.
Full access to online music stores
Select from more than a million songs from a myriad of online music stores - Napster To Go, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Rhapsody To Go, and so much more. With PlaysForSure support, you will always be able to play any digital music purchased or subscribed to.
View from all angles
Rotate your screen orientation to suit your preference.
Review
Sure, Apple iPods dominate the MP3 player market, but don't write off rivals such as Creative. The new Creative Zen V Plus is a very strong offering that could cut significantly into Apple's slice of the flash-based MP3 player pie. Available in several color configurations and memory capacities (up to 4GB), the Zen V Plus offers way more features than the Apple iPod nano—including video playback, FM radio, and voice/line-in recording—in a very cute, less-expensive package. It joins the SanDisk Sansa e200 series and the iriver Clix as excellent iPod nano alternatives, but as with the others, there's room for improvement. Creative also has a stripped-down version called simply the Zen V, which lacks video playback and FM radio. Pricing for the Zen V Plus is $129.99 (1GB), $169.99 (2GB), and $229.99 (4GB), and the Zen V is $119.99 (1GB), $149.99 (2GB), and $199.99 (4GB). They are currently scheduled to ship in August.
At first glance, the Zen V Plus looks like a combination of an iPod (thanks to a purely decorative ring in the center that looks like a scroll wheel) and a Tamagotchi. Measuring 1.7 by 2.7 by 0.6 inches and weighing 1.5 ounces, it isn't as tall as the iPod nano, but it's a little more than twice as thick. The rounded back, complete with the same ripple as that of the Zen Vision and Zen Vision:M, feels remarkably comfortable in the hand. The backlit Play/Pause and Back buttons on front, along with the very precise pushable joystick, are very easy to operate with one hand, and there are dedicated Volume and Record buttons on the right side. A combination Power/Hold switch graces the right side of the device, and the mini-USB 2.0 port, 3.5mm headphone jack, 2.5mm line-in jack, and pinhole microphone are along the top. On the left side, there's a small pinhole reset button. The 1.5-inch, 128- by 128-pixel color OLED screen and the plastic shell seem very resistant to scratches, at least they did in my few days of testing.
Color-scheme offerings aren't as varied as for the Zen MicroPhoto and are tied to the memory capacity: The 1GB model comes in white or black with orange trim; the 2GB comes in white or black with green trim, and the 4GB comes only in black with blue trim.
The Zen V Plus is easy to navigate and operate with one hand, though some users have noted that the pushable joystick is very tiny. The device's interface is sluggish at times (the player often asks you to "Please wait . . . "), but for the most part it is responsive. The menus are very straightforward. For instance, holding the Back button for a second or so invokes contextual menus for functions such as setting a photo as the player's wallpaper and setting bookmarks, depending on which mode you're in. The toughest part about using the Zen V Plus is scrolling through long lists of songs or artists, because there's no scrolling acceleration or power-scroll feature. You can search by letter or keyword by entering text via the joystick, though. One nice touch is that you can rotate the screen's orientation 90, 180, or 270 degrees.
The Zen V Plus syncs with Windows Media Player 10, but only for music and pictures. To convert and transfer video, you must use the included Creative Video Converter. The Creative Media Explorer software can also grab your Microsoft Outlook contacts, calendars, and tasks and transfer them to the player's Organizer. Some people find this very handy, though I'd prefer if you could edit these items directly on the device.
The Zen V Plus is PlaysForSure certified, so it works with WMA-based online music download and subscription services, though it doesn't work with video services such as Vongo. Of course, it also works with MP3 and unprotected WMA files. Some audio geeks may be disappointed with the lack of OGG and lossless support, but the supported formats should be fine for mainstream users. At the time of this writing, Audible support was not yet available, so I couldn't test how well it works with that service. I was assured by Creative that the player will support Audible content right out of the box when the player ships.
Converted video files from Creative Video Converter are in a proprietary DIB format (128 by 96 pixels) but at only 12 frames per second, which makes longer clips very fatiguing to watch. The software can convert most common video formats, including AVI (DivX and XviD), WMV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and QuickTime (MOV). It can also convert DVR-MS files, which is content that's recorded on a PC running Windows Media Center Edition. Creative Video Converter is easy enough to use, though it would be nicer if the device could handle WMV files, which could be converted right in Windows Media Player. Photo files are limited to JPEG.
The Zen V Plus performs all the standard playback functions, including various repeat and shuffle modes. You can create (and delete) multiple playlists directly on the device and name them via the easy-to-use text-entry function. You can also delete individual files or groups (Artist, Album, Genre, and so on). The fun DJ feature provides a few automatically generated playlists such as Album of the Day and Rarely Heard. You can also set bookmarks in any audio file and then browse those bookmarks.
Can You Hear It?
The sound quality with the included earbuds is very good, with no audible system noise or glitches. Subjective bass performance is good but not exceptional, though you're limited by the earbuds. When I swapped out the Creative earbuds for my Grado SR80 headphones and Etymotic ER-4P, the device performed admirably, with punchy bass.
Sound enhancement options include bass boost, a handful of genre-oriented equalization presets, and a custom five-band equalizer (EQ). Of the bunch, I prefer the custom EQ, though the bass boost works well if you're listening with the stock earbuds in a noisy environment.
I measured the Zen V Plus's frequency response, and it is roughly equivalent to that of the iPod nano-that is, flat in the mid and upper ranges-with just a hair less power in the bass (though the difference is nearly imperceptible). The signal shows no significant harmonic distortion even at maximum volume, but that doesn't mean the earbuds won't distort at such high levels.
When playing Boston's "More Than a Feeling," the Zen V Plus drove the included earbuds to a maximum sustained level of 106 dB with peaks of 110dB. This is quite loud, and I recommend being very careful about your listening volume. I found comfortable volumes at between 11 and 18 on the 25-step scale, depending on the levels and type of music being played.
The FM tuner supports 32 presets and is of adequate sensitivity for picking up both major stations and smaller ones. I didn't hear any system noise on any of the stations I tried, and the device lets you name your presets as well as record FM content in WAV format at 22 kHz, which is adequate for talk radio and doesn't take up too much space.
Line-in recording is in MP3 format at 128 Kbps or 160 Kbps, and there's a sync feature that automatically breaks up tracks for you. The voice recorder captures audio in WAV format at only 8 kHz, which is just good enough for recording voice notes at fairly close range. You can also monitor the recording levels for all three types of recording via a graphical level meter.
Not Much to See Here
I'm not in love with the Zen V Plus's screen quality. OLED screens have certain benefits, like reduced power drain and perfect viewing angles, but photos on the Zen V Plus's screen have a bit of a bluish cast. You can pan and zoom (up to 2X), and you can set photos as the player's wallpaper.
I conducted my usual battery rundown test on the Zen V Plus using the included earbuds at a comfortable listening volume, and I got 18 hours 10 minutes of continuous audio playback time. This is generally considered pretty good, and it falls in between the iPod nano and the SanDisk Sansa e260. Of course, the Sansa e260 has a user-replaceable battery; the Zen V Plus does not.
The Zen V Plus ships with standard Creative earbuds (straight plug, silver-plated connector, symmetrical cables), a lanyard, a drawstring pouch, a 20-inch mini-USB 2.0 cable, a 2.5mm-to-3.5mm gold-plated line-in cable, and a software installation CD. There are also a few optional accessories available for it, including a silicone case with belt clip and an armband.
I wish the interface were a little faster and that you could transfer the video directly from within WMP 10. But I do like the ability to perform keyword searches and do a fair amount of things directly on the device. Overall, the Creative Zen V Plus is a very satisfying device for mainstream consumers, especially given that it's cheaper than the iPod nano of equivalent capacity. It is jam-packed with features, and though the photo and video functions aren't particularly impressive, the audio features are sure to please.