My old Zen micro 5gb served me well for the last three years, however during the last semester the on-off-lock switch became unresponsive, requiring a cleaver hack to turn on and off the device. This was my first hard disk based mp3 player, and I’m returning to a flash based device (so that I can run while listening to music). For Christmas I received the 8GiB Creative ZEN, which is sort of the spiritual successor of my Zen micro.
Let me be the first to correct the others out there that make it seem like you have to transcode everything to WMV to play on it. While it is true that the ZEN needs mpeg1/2 files transcoded, they don’t have to be transcoded to WMV. The ZEN does natively support Xvid/MPEG4-SP/DivX in addition to WMV. Since I do have many mpeg music videos I will have to transcode some, but MediaCoder does a good job at that. Most users would transcode anyways as playing a 720p video on a 320×240 screen is overkill and would eat up battery life in order to scale the video while playing, the size benefit is there too, 30MiB or less for most music videos under 5 minutes in length. Hope you all are having a merry Christmas.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]