By definition Creative are one of the best innovaters of sound products on the market today. I've never yet gone wrong with a creative product and once again i'm not disappointed, just purring over another yet another high quality product that does exactly what it says on the tin!

I've owned an ipod, and lesser branded mp3 players over the past few years, but for me this beats them all hands down....

Firstly its small, compact and extremley lightweight... For a moment when your sat on train listening to one of your many music created playlists, you can even forget that, you've even got the device sat in your coat jacket pocket....

As soon as you switch on the "Zen" on, your presented with a very clear, crisp display, giving very good colour definition. Choose between your music collection, pictures, videos clips/movies, microphone for dictation and FM radio..

You can adjust your player settings or perhaps check any tasks, contacts or notes that you've synchronised onto the Zen. The software bundled is easy to use and quite efficient at converting and transferring your files in reasonable time.....

The menus are easy to navigate and a total breeze.....

The sound clarity is excellent and the equaliser presets extract the most out of the different music genres you'll play. Note you can also create your own presets too!

As always with most players, the earphones bundled with them are not going to blow you away. So an earphone upgrade might be necessary somewhere along the line if your a big sound enthusiast...

There are only a couple of issues (nothing is perfect).. It can be slow to load up when you player is packed full and the additional memory expansion doesn't intergate itself with the rest of your player as you would expect.

For example, if you want to access the data on your memory card then you have to go into that the via memory card menu. In other words the memory card itself does not integrate into the main library of files on the player itself. Equally if you wish to create a playlist of the tracks from your memory card then you simply cannot do it, unless you duplicate the songs onto the main players internal memory......

So therefore, i'd recommend this 16gb version of Zen if you've a sizeable catalogue of files you wish to store. (Previously i owned the 4gb version)

However despite those negative aspects, its truly a wonderful player that can handle many files extensions. Video playback is superb and despite a small screen, the picture quality is excellent... I've often used my player to watch movies and tv programmes while travelling around.

Also With other players i've used and played around with sometimes synchronising movie/video files onto players don't always work that well, but this player is upto the task time and again...

To sum up...

Its a must buy if your looking for a good alternative to an Ipod or Sony Walkman. I would recommend anyone to weigh up their file storage demands first before deciding on which storage size zen to get, due to the issues of integrating a memory card.

Its still rock and roll to me:-)