A budget player for those with no love for excessive functions or features (Creative Zen Stone 1 GB)

Member Name: geek_squad

Product:	Creative Zen Stone 1 GB
Date:	05/07/09 (18 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Low price, compact, good battery stamina

Disadvantages: Awful audio quality, lacks even basic essential functions such as hold feature, lacks radio

The Zen Stone is clearly Creative's attempt on challenging the Apple Ipod shuffle, it is similar being lightweight, compact and with no display screen.

As expected the navigation on the Zen Stone is rather confusing. It does not allow you to browse various menu, instead it only allows you to skip individual tracks until you find the desired one.

In terms of battery stamina it is exception, providing an average of 27 hours from just a 90 minute charge. Making it quite convenient.
It has an average rate of file transfer, on average it takes about 4.3 seconds to transfer 10 megabytes of audio files.
However, the device is quite basic and lacks other features and functions. It even does not have some of the bog standard features that are expected, let alone a radio or voice recording capabilities. Shockingly, there isn't a hold feature which constantly caused the player to be turned off whilst moving around.
When using the supplied headphones, the audio quality was absolutely repulsive, lacking bass and treble, upon using a more expensive additional pair of headphones (purchased separately) a slight improvement was noticeable, which makes it not worth while due to the extra cost of the other pair of headphones.
I personally feel that in rushing to attempt to rival Apple, Creative have produced a product with giving much thought to its ergonomics and technical details. As a result of rushing, we as consumers are having to put up with a poorly designed.

Summary: It is acceptable for a budget player, but it could be better especially if you want many features

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