Yesterday was my birthday and failing to open my gift from my parents turned into something of mixed results. When I woke up this morning I skipped searching for the Easter basket and went straight for my birthday gift. Low and behold I actually got what I really wanted, a Creative Labs Zen Micro. This came to somewhat of a surprise but either way this device is great.

As you may or may not know I have an aging Creative Labs Nomad II (32MB built in, 128MB Smart Media card). This was a great device, after the three months of hell in the beginning with problems with the device deciding to not work after two months of use. I loved the headphones that it came with and it fit the hand very well, and best of all it used AA batteries that could be replaced when they ran out of energy. From my very pleasant experience with the Nomad II and other Creative products, the T5400 speakers and the sound blaster series, I expected allot from the Zen Micro when I first read about it.

After letting it charge with the wall charger for about four hours it was fully charged, well I had to leave after I plugged it in and I returned about four hours later so I returned to it being fully charged. I would stress for anyone that gets this product to be extremely careful when installing the battery, or changing batteries, Creative placed a warranty sticker in the bottom edge of the slot at an angle (not fully in contact with the plastic edge the entire time), not a very smart move, which is extremely fragile and it will end up tearing, many people have had this problem, and it did it to me. I knew about this problem and tried to be careful but somehow it still did it, the battery is keyed and slightly shorter then it’s slot, allowing aftermarket batteries to potentially have higher mAh ratings, the supplied battery is a 3.7 volt Li-ion Polymer 680mAh battery with a supposed 12 hour battery life, we’ll see about that this summer.

The Micro comes with three tracks on the hard drive, one being the ever so familiar Creative Labs channel test jingle, “Welcome the Experience” and two others that are there to demonstrate the high fidelity audio output capabilities of the device. The first thing to do once the Micro is fully charged is to install all of the syncing software; I recommend just installing the drivers if one has Windows Media Player 10 already installed. The software requests that you restart your computer, which I did, then I recommend if you intend to upgrade to Plays For Sure compatibility to do so at this time, otherwise it is still a wise choice to get the latest firmware from http://www.nomadworld.com since the next thing to do is to transfer your music.

Since reinstalling XP in January I have only used the Media Player 10 utilities to transfer my music to my Nomad II, so naturally I opted to use the same methods for the drag and drop transfer mechanism integrated into explorer via WMP10. It works great except for disk stats, so it is easy to loose track of free space, this was more of a problem with a Nomad II, but for some this may still be a problem. I did all my transferring using a USB 1.1 connection, since my computer is five years old, it ended up taking little over half an hour to transfer about 1.1GB of music to the Micro, I have in total about 3GB of music.

Now it’s ready for testing. While playing with my Zen Micro I noticed a few *new* neat things, well new when coming from a Nomad II. I love how the player is able to play music while one is in the menu, looking/changing settings, viewing play lists. When entering the menu on the Nomad II the music stops playing, which was very annoying. Other nice improvements is the navigation, the scroll pad is very nice when compared to going in iPod circles and when using the next/previous track buttons on the Nomad II. The sound is just great, the included earbuds are adequate for day to day listening, but the quality just doesn’t compare to the back bone head phones which were included with the Nomad II, but a pair of Altec Lansing headphones will do for long trips. The included belt clip and stand is nice, and the stand looks very good, with a nice rubber edge padding to securely grip the Micro. The feature that I love most so far has to be the full functionality of the USB port, which allows the device to be charged via any USB host, a feature that was missing in the Nomad II, allows this to be a real road warrior tool. The random/shuffle feature is much better in the Micro then in the Nomad II; the latter had problems with playing the same song twice in a row if the player was shutdown in the middle of the song, this problem doesn’t occur in the Micro.

Transferring was much easier and faster on the USB1.1 interface when compared with an iPod mini, which I have worked with for a relative. It took literally half an hour to get the iPod to sync correctly with iTunes and transfer, plus several restarts and a firmware update to the iPod. The iPod Mini doesn’t stand a chance when compared to the Zen Micro.

Some claim poor battery life, but that is due to the fact that the player when using the original firmware doesn’t like charging with the AC/DC adapter, and that if you don’t shut it down the Micro goes into a standby/sleep mode, just like Windows can, which shuts off the internal hard drive but it doesn’t. Others have experienced lockups, which I’ve yet to find, though I’m not using play lists at all, just the random function, so I don’t know what could be causing these lock ups, though shutdown seems to take a while, I guess some must be impatient and assume it locked up on shut down. I am using the latest firmware, 1.02.05, and I’ve played with store models at local CompUSAs for months with out lockups, which the sales people said that they have yet to have it lock up, and a few of them own the same Micro also. The brother of a friend of mine has a Zen Micro, that he’s had since Christmas so if there are any time related problems I’ll know about them before I’ll experience them.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]