Creative Labs 70PF165000000 Zen MicroPhoto 8 GB MP3 Player (Titanium Gray) by Creative
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Digital camera reviews of Creative Labs 70PF165000000 Zen MicroPhoto 8 GB MP3 Player (Titanium Gray)
Digital camera Review: A KIDS REVIEW
Summary: 5 Stars
well to start off i got mine for christmas and have not had a problem since i have got it!the battery life is nice and the fact that if it were to go bad i can replace it!to transfer the music is so simple my little sister can do it!i also love the fact that it can also hold up to 4,000 songs and a bunch of pics!and for the ipod you pay more and it holds less than this one.so go for this over a freakin ipod!Digital camera Review: A good MP3 Player until you have to take the battery out....
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this mp3 player after doing much research online, I was excited about all the rave reviews I read, I guess I should have went to customer-oriented sites like this to see how it lasts in real world situations. I am not new to mp3 players I have had an ipod which I loved and was sad when it met its demise, so i decided to buy this product....big mistake...after only having it for less than a month it froze on me, I tried reseting it with no results, so I read in the manual that you can remove the battery and reset it that way...Well that resulted in my hard drive deleting all of my songs, and my computer no longer recognized the player. Apparently this is a problem with the creative firmware erasing everything and no longer be recognized by the comp. I would have to recommend not getting this one and going with another brand.Digital camera Review: Absolutely Delighted with the Zen Micro Photo
Summary: 5 Stars
I am absolutley delighted with this player. The color screen makes the player FUN... otherwise no advantage over monochrome. Love the fact that you can create multiple playlists on the player itself and name them for future recall. Just love the way the menu structure works... takes a little figuring out at first, but not difficult and gives you so much more control over the player. FM radio is a nice plus when you just want something different. Battery life is more than acceptable and the battery is replaceable, so you can always carry a spare when you take that 17 hour flight to Sidney!! Very nice construction and I very much like the size... rests very comfortably in your hand... The nano is TOO small for me. The full size iPOD is TOO big for my use. Don't hesitate... you will end up loving this player. Hey, the 8GB is sooo.. nice. Oh, and one more thing... you can just drag and drop your mp3 files via Windows Explorer to the player... my favorite method... so easy... Also, when you touch a control the player lights up in a very pleasant blue color... again FUN... just like your music!Digital camera Review: Abysmal Software and tempermental interface
Summary: 2 Stars
It has great look and a great sound, but...ugh. The software. From the firmware to the desktop software the Zen is cursed with bugs and poor design.
Start with the player itself. The buttons are tempermental -- sometimes oversensitive, sometimes unresponsive (i.e. sometimes there's a confusing delay). Which means it takes a deft touch to navigate to the song you want - and fastforwarding or rewinding through a song without accidentally restarting it or skipping to the next song requires the fine motor skills of a seasoned gamer.
But that you can live with if you're patient. It's the desktop software that's makes using this a true nightmare. For one thing, I had the same problem many people writing here complained about - my computer simply would not recognize the Zen out of the box. I reinstalled several times; tweaked everything from the registry to the settings to replacing the cord for about a day when finally something (I'm still not sure what) kicked in and it decided to recognize the player. But even now, when I tried updating the firmware, the firmware updater will not recognize the player, so I'm stuck with what's there.
OK, so I finally got it to recognize my Zen. Somehow. That's when the real fun began. Not. The Media Explorer Crashes. Often. Plus even when it "works" it's designed so badly it takes a ridiculous amount of time to get anything done. For reasons I'll never understand, you have to launch separate programs to organize your songs, add songs, create new playlists and edit playlists. In other words every task requires launching a separate program - some of which will crash on launch, some won't. It's always a surprise. Fun fun. At this point the most important programs won't crash on launch (although they'll occasionally crash midway through a task). But the organizer (for addresses) still crashes without fail. I was able to add addresses at one point - what changed that i could launch it once and now can't? I'll never know. In any event I'm stuck with the addresses put in there 3 months ago.
But even when the editors work properly, they have the most user unfriendly design ever dreamt up by a programmer, so it takes absurdly long to manage songs. Changes have to be done one song at a time, and you can't sort or group the songs - to say mass delete, move, find rapidly, etc. To get anything done you have to hunt the songs down folder by folder. I tried switching to Windows MediaPlayer and Napster to see if they were able to do what the Zen software couldn't (i.e. *work*), but that made the situation worse. They just created duplicate libraries, which now can't be deleted, and I can only delete duplicate songs one at a time, but had to leave the duplicate music library and album/artist folders intact, which means I have a hell of a time finding songs now sorting through hundreds of folders that now no longer contain anything...well you get the idea...shiver.
Digital camera Review: Almost genius
Summary: 1 Stars
It is almost sheer genius honestly. Take the biggest selling MP3 player, the i-pod and identify and correct the biggest complaint (the battery shelf life and the fact that it is irreplaceable) Produce a smart little machine at a better price with quality sound. Then screw the software so incredibly to make the machine un-useable - at least if you value your sanity!
I came to Creative after dealing with Apple's contemptuous customer service, how they get away with treating their customers like excrement is beyond me. So I tried this machine (not from Amazon I hasten to add).
The problem with this stems from the fact that the machine will not allow you to store 2 tracks with the same name. So if you have a live CD of an artist you like and already have studio versions of some of the songs when you try to transfer them it gives you the choice to over-ride the first version or cancel importing the second version. Now, even if you have the same track recorded BY DIFFERENT ARTISTS it will NOT allow you to import without first altering the name of the track!!! Then you have to go through the painstaking and time consuming task of deleting all the tracks from that particular CD from the machine and from the computer. Then re-import them to the computer after amending the title of the offending tracks - only then you can put them into your machine. The result, it has just taken over 3 hours to get 3 CD's uploaded into the machine because just 2 titles (from 75) were already on the machine by different artists.
There is a benefit to this, as while you waste your time with this process, you can quickly come onto [...] and give it one star warning customers of this joke software.
It seems abundantly clear that Creative have no desire to increase their share of the MP3 market, so grant them their wish and shop for an alternative.