Reg review Some market watchers say that mobile phones will eventually supersede standalone MP3 players. Creative's latest device certainly anticipates such a move, in design if not functionality. If ever there was a digital music player that looks and feels like a handset, it's the Zen Micro (ZM). With it's compact size, gently curvaceous casing and one-thumb operation, it's hard not to bring the ZM up to your ear and start nattering.

It's all about competing with Apple's iPod Mini, rather than phones, of course. While Creative hardware developers have focused solely on technology, they've come up with good but by and large plain devices. The Zen Touch was the company's first attempt the iPod's savoir faire, but lacked the looks and inflicted a complex, 11-button control system on anyone who tried to use it. The ZM is a big step forward. Not only is it something of a looker, it's far easier to use than past Zens.

For starters, it feels very comfortable in your hand. At 8.3 x 5 x 1.8, it lacks the cigarette-lighter slimness of the iPod Mini, but feels more solid, less flimsy. The screen's a small 1.4in white-backlit LCD - Creative's traditional blue backlight being reserved for the buttons beneath the display and the rim around the fascia. The display itself presents an almost but not quite an exact copy of the iPod UI. Another similarity is the ZM's ability to sync up with PIM software - Microsoft Outlook in this case - to hold your contacts and diary entries, ready for on-the-move access, PDA-fashion.

The buttons - play/pause, track skip forward and backward, plus Menu, Back a step and a Zen Touch-esque central virtual jog-dial - are carved out of a single touch-sensitive panel that responds with a click and is far more responsive than the Touch's version. The ZM uses a simple select and click approach to menu navigation, with the aforementioned Back button taking you up the hierarchy one step at a time. It's a more intuitive system than those Creative players have offered and undoubtedly iPod-inspired.

The Menu button doesn't take you straight to the top of the sequence of commands. Instead, it pops up a context-sensitive menu of options relevant to what's on the screen at that time. It's a nice idea spoiled by Creative's attempt to make the pop-up panel look like a desktop OS' right-click menu. Taking up a large portion of the bottom right of the screen, it looks kludgy - since it only appears for a moment, why not just fill the whole screen? But it does provide quick access to features like the ZM's list search system, its bookmark facility and on-the-fly playlist creation.

On top of the ZM you'll find the power key, a spring-loaded slider that's moved one way to turn the player on and off and the other to lock the controls. Alongside it is the earphone socket - without an obvious remote control connector - the USB 2.0 port and the tiny hole that's the ZM's microphone. Yes, it provides the obligatory (apparently) voice recording facility, activated through the Extras menu. If you're into using your MP3 player as a Dictaphone too, the ZM is as good as any, providing up to ten hours' continuous recording, though there's a convenient context-sensitive menu option, Split, to break the recording into manageable chunks while you're taping.

Like many mobile phones, a portion of the ZM's back panel slides off to reveal the handset-style compact, removable 680mAh rechargeable battery. You almost expect to find a SIM slot beneath it. You don't, but you do get a second battery in the box which you can keep charged and ready to swap in when the first one dies. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is the one thing Apple should learn from its competition. There's nothing worse than finding your iPod's battery has gone dead while it's been sitting on the shelf and you're just about to go out. If only you could just flip in a new power pack... That said, my box was market 'limited edition', so don't expect Creative to offer a second battery for ever.

Creative quotes up to 12 hours for the ZM's playtime on a single charge. I got just eight hours running two-odd hours' worth of 128Kbps MP3 files over and over out of the test machine's pre-installed power pack. That's not bad, but since it's some way from the claimed duration, I ran the test again, this time with the unopened spare battery, in order to be sure it had been given the correct three-hour initial charge. Again, the ZM didn't make it to 12 hours.

There's only one other flaw with the ZM's battery: inserting it tears the 'warranty void if removed' sticker on the inside of the device. Let's hope no one notices if I have to take it back, ahem.

Hidden inside the ZM is its 1in 5GB hard drive - a Seagate unit, I believe. Creative claims it's not only bigger than the iPod Mini's 4GB Hitachi HDD but more reliable. Maybe it is, but it's certainly a slow unit. It takes around five seconds to start playing a new song when you've already got one running, unless you're simply skipping tracks forward or back, and even that doesn't feel as responsive as other players do.

Saving a playlist takes a similar irritating duration, as does getting the ZM ready to record after you've selected Record from the context-sensitive menu - and again when you've selected Stop. Ditto opening a playlist listing.

The ZM's hard drive can be used as a USB Mass Storage device, but you have to enable it to do so first - it's by no means plug and play. Worse, the player limits how much of its disk space can be used for general files - you can choose from 128MB, 256MB, 512MB and then in 512MB intervals up to 2GB. Pardon me, but isn't it my choice how much space I use for music and for other files? To be fair to Creative, this could well be a limit imposed by Microsoft's Windows Media 10 DRM technology - which the ZM supports - desperate as the Beast of Redmond is to prevent us from using USB Mass Storage devices to copy media files whether we've a right to do so or not. Assume from the word go that people are thieves, and they'll soon tell you what they think of you by choosing other companies' products.

UpdateCreative tells me leaving the Removable Disk option disabled allows the whole disk to data storage. Not that this 'feature' is any way obvious from the ZM itself or even the manual...

The ZM's data partition mounts perfectly on other operating systems than Windows - just make sure you select the Removable Disk option on the ZM first - but as yet there's no way of accessing the music partition.

For PC users, Creative provides the latest version of its sub-iTunes MediaSource software, but you can also use Windows Media Player 10 or Creative's Zen Media Explorer, its drag-and-drop tool. Yes, WM10 requires a separate client to do something drag and drop. Don't let anyone tell you Microsoft's approach to DRM and content lock-down isn't all encompassing. Pity poor Creative - and any other hardware vendor that wants to use WM10 - that has to jump through all these hoops just to get that 'Plays for Sure' logo...

Pity PC users too. I installed WM10 and Media Explorer on a Sony Vaio running Windows XP pre-Service Pack 2 and got the Blue Screen of Death every time I tried to run the Creative Software. Fortunately, Creative's drivers also make the ZM appear under My Computer's My Audio Devices section, and I was able to drag and drop a stack of MP3 files over that way. It wasn't quick, even with USB 2.0.

And the sound's pretty good with the iPod-styled ZM earphones. If it's not quite right for you, the player offers the usual equaliser pre-sets - eight in this case - plus a custom, five-band EQ setting so you can adjust the sound to your personal preference.

The ZM keeps a count of the number of times each track is played. There's a cute option, DJ, which plays the most popular - or the least loved - songs or will pick an album at random and play that. Just what you need when faced with the inevitable indecision that comes when you can choose from thousands of songs.

If you prefer to pick things out yourself, the ZM allows you to create any number of playlists and save them on the device for future reference. It's a powerful system, but one made confusing by the fact that saved playlists, when selected for playback, are loaded into the ZM's single 'live' custom playlist, Selected Music. You can only edit Selected Music, but changing it doesn't affect the stored playlist. Saving it again with the same name simply creates another saved playlist, the original's name having been automatically changed slightly.

In addition to playlists and Selected Music, the ZM also offers ten Bookmarks. These note exactly where in the song you were when the bookmark was saved. It's handy for marking out a good riff or an important part of a recorded meeting, say, but that's about it.

If your stored music doesn't appeal, the ZM has a stereo FM tuner for you. It's a tad hissy, as most personal analogue radios are, but it works and you can save up to 32 stations in nameable pre-sets. You can also record broadcasts, but be warned, make sure you start recording five seconds early or you'll miss a bit of the programme while the ZM's hard drive goes through its inevitable short but noticeable spin-up cycle.

Verdict

The Zen Micro is a real improvement on Creative's previous compact HDD-based music player, the MuVo2, and over the company's large-format hard drive units, the Zen Jukebox range. I'm not sure about the line's bright colours but the white unit I looked is certainly Creative's best looking player yet.

But by trying too hard to look like an iPod, it risks being seen as a 'me too' product. That would be a shame - it's a good music player, and it's size, styling, capacity and radio make it a worthy challenger to the Apple product. ®

Recent Reviews

Creative Zen Touch
Sony Network Walkman NW-HD1
Voq Pro smart phone
HTC 'Blue Angel' Wi-Fi PocketPC phone
Mio 8390 smart phone
Motorola e1000 3G phone
Evesham Axis Xcelsior Athlon 64 4000+ PC
Pentax Optio X digicam