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Creative Zen Mozaic MP3 player

Tough, capacious and affordable

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Review First announced back in July, the Mozaic settles nicely into Creative's MP3 player range sitting between the Zen Stone Plus and the Zen proper.

Fashioned from slightly cheap-feeling, but nevertheless extremely scratch resistant, black plastic, the Mozaic measures up at 80 x 40 x 13mm and weighs around 40g. It's available in 2, 4, 8 and 16GB flavours, and lacks anything in the way of a memory expansion slot.

Creative Mozaic 4GB MP3 player

Creative's Zen Mozaic: for lovers of Byzantine art

The base specification is pretty much what we've come to expect from Creative. You get an FM radio with 32 station pre-sets - no RDS, though - a small built-in speaker; alarm clock; calendar; to-do list; and contacts database. The Mozaic also has a built-in microphone so it can double up as a basic voice recorder, saving up to ten hours of your thoughts and storing these as WAV files.

Aesthetically, the front of the device is dominated by a 1.8in, 128 x 160, 65,000-colour OLED screen below which - and slightly offset to the left - is a 3 x 3 grid of buttons for navigation. The controls are all in a slightly different shade of the device's base colour, hence the name.

The on/off/lock switch resides on the upper right side of the device - at the bottom you'll find a 3.5mm headphones socket and a mini-USB port. The nicely rounded contours of the player make it a good bet for stuffing into a pocket or handbag without ending up with any unwanted entanglements or snags.

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Latest Comments

U-G-L-Y, creative ain't got no alibi

It looks like the bastard love child of a mobile phone and a 1970's bathroom tile set.

nil-point

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libmtp

Linux can connect to mtp devices just fine through libmtp, tho its a lot easier if one uses a frontend for it such as amarok or gnomad2

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@ Alun

Doesn't Gnomad2 interface with this on Linux? It works just fine for my Zen V Plus - maybe it will also work with the X-Fi and Mozaic.

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