The touch strip present on the Zen VisionM and the directional pad featured on the newer Creative Zen have been supplanted by nine buttons arranged in a three-by-three grid. It does have a few notable changes from earlier Creative models, however. People who are already familiar with Creative’s players should get the hang of the X-Fi’s design and interface right away. The USB port doubles as the unit’s power port however, it includes only a USB cable, not a wall adapter. (It took me more than an hour to load 10GB of songs onto the player’s flash drive via the USB cable.) Downloading songs wirelessly went much faster. The X-Fi connects to your PC via USB 2.0, but loading songs onto the player by this route is slow going. But creating a playlist with the Creative Centrale desktop software (included with the player) is much easier than doing so in-unit: Just drag and drop music from your library into a new playlist. I still haven’t gotten the hang of Creative’s on-player playlist creator, even after years of using it with the Zen VisionM. The X-Fi makes it a lot harder to create playlists without the help of a computer, too. Also, the X-Fi unit seems a bit small (3.3 inches by 2.2 inches by 0.5 inches) next to the iPod Touch and its generous screen. It doesn’t work with Mac OS X (only with XP and Vista) its online chat application doesn’t work well and you won’t find the same degree of integration with third-party speaker systems, car stereos, and accessories that you’ll find with the near-ubiquitous iPod. You get an on-board speaker as well, but it pumps tinny, clock-radio-quality sound out of its single, small speaker.Īs much as I found to like about the X-Fi, it does have some limitations when matched head-to-head against the iPod Touch. The player supports AAC, MP3, WAV, and WMA formats, as well as Audible audiobooks. What does that mean for your ears? Creative’s X-Fi technology, coupled with the great out-of-the-box earbuds, delivered very deep, clean, well-defined audio. And the X-Fi earned the best rating of any player we’ve tested in terms of harmonic distortion and noise–at a barely registering 0.01 percent. Its signal-to-noise ratio of 83 dB is second only to the SanDisk Sansa Connect’s 84 dB in our tests. The earbuds, which Creative also sells separately for $80, fit snugly in the listeners’ ears and provide clear low-end audio, with midrange treble that isn’t tinny.Ĭreative’s highly touted X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity Audio playback goes far in helping this player sound amazing. Plus, you can fine-tune the already superb sound with the player’s five-band EQ settings save voice recordings listen to FM radio and enjoy the listening experience right out of the box without buying new headphones, thanks to the surprisingly good-sounding Creative EP-830 earbuds included with the unit. Not only can you download music, video, and images wirelessly from your home computer to the player, but you can also stream media from your computer, from Creative’s servers (which offer podcasts and free music), or from a computer on an open network. A few features differentiate this player from the competition.
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