ZEN MX: good iPod alternative? (Creative Zen MX 16 GB)

Member Name: theom

Product:	Creative Zen MX 16 GB
Date:	13/08/09 (155 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very attractive, fairly intuitive to use, and much cheaper than the equivalent iPod.

Disadvantages: Buttons don't feel very nice, proved unreliable.

I bought this particular MP3 player as an upgrade from my 4GB iPod nano, as I eventually had aquired more music than would fit on it! Aesthetically it's a very good looking piece of kit, the screen takes up the majority of the front and the back has a nice rippled effect. The screen itself is very bright and clear, I found it was very good indeed for watching videos. In terms of controls the new ZEN feels very 'windows-like', scrolling through folders to access music, and it even has a button functionally similar to the left mouse button on a computer. The buttons themselves are a little bit heavy, it requires more effort than should be needed to scroll through music quickly, but the intuitive alphabet scrolling capability was a nice touch. Moving from the iPod to the ZEN in terms of controls was a bit dis-satisfying, I found that button pressing isn't nearly as efficient as the scroll wheel of iPods and it took a lot longer to get to the song I'd want to play.
Songs sounded much the same through this as they did through my iPod (unsurprisingly) so I was pleased with the quality. Putting music and other fils onto the device is very easy, and it's not difficult to get your itunes library onto the thing.
The SD card slot was a really nice feature, instantly increasing the memory of the device, the only downside being that songs on the SD card are not added to the library and have to be accessed seperately to songs on the device.
After about 2 months of using the ZEN MX it began to frequently freeze. Sound would stop coming out, the screen would freeze and the controls would not work. The first few times I let the battery drain completely, then recharged the thing and it worked again, but eventually I stopped bothering and have since gone back to my iPod!

Summary: A decent MP3 player, that in the end turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.

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