My girlfriend is jealous of the attention I'm giving this thing.....

Ok, so last week I went over how much ipods suck compared to lower-priced, more compatible, better-featured competitors.

I am about to go on a lengthy review of my new toy, the Creative Zen 8gb. For those of you who don't want to sit through the nitty gritty details, here it is plain and simple: It's amazing and I recommend it over a stupidass iPod any day. This aint some cheap knockoff competitor, this is the real thing. Solid design, great interface, and features that will make you cry alone in your sleep for having wasted your cash on Apple's marketing scheme. AND, it looks great enough to tote around and be stylish with if that's all you really care about. Again, I have to re-iterate:

EAT MY SHIT, APPLE.

Now, on with the details:

Well, my Creative Zen arrived in all it's 8gb glory yesterday and my god am I like a kid on Christmas today. This thing is freakin sweet. It's been far too long that I've been in the audio stone age trying to navigate around on a two-tone 1/4"x1" lcd display. When I turned this thing on for the first time, the 2.5" 16.7 MILLION color screen made me very concerned for the aridity and integrity of my pants. This player is gorgeous, plain and simple. It's about the size of a credit card and about as thick as the diameter of a Sharpie, and it's got a solid feel to it. Not heavy by any means, but also not cheaply light either. Metal enclosure with a hard plastic front make it look very sleek. Next to the screen are the navigation buttons, which include a four-way rocker with a center button, a play/pause button, a programmable option button, a menu/back button, and an advanced options button. The tactile buttons are easily used and spaced out well enough that you're not going to push the wrong one, but they are the flimsiest piece of the player (though aren't really that flimsy). Did I mention the screen? Oh. I did alread? Well too bad, it's fantastic. It's got a slick, fading backlight on it that you can adjust the timing for, and the brightness can also be adjusted. It comes set at 50% brightness, and I boosted it to 70%, and it's amazing. 100% is just ungodly pretty and might give you a sunburn.

Let me lay out the features on this thing:

Music player: MP3, WMA, non-protected AAC, WAV and Audible 2,3 and 4 (for audio books) formats
Video Player: MJPEG, WMV9 and (with transcoding - MPEG1 and 2, MPEG4-SP, DivX 4 and 5 and XviD)
Photo Viewer: JPEG and (with transcoding - GIF, TIFF, PNG and BMP)
FM Radio: with 32 presets
Voice Recorder
Clock & Alarm
Organizer: Syncs with Microsoft Outlook
& it supports album art

The provided software is nothing fancy, but it coincides nicely with Windows XP for a straightforward, no frills approach and will convert video and image files into the proper format.

Back to the interface: awesome. It comes in a default red color scheme, which looks great as it is, but you can choose from 6 color themes (I changed mine to a great-looking royal blue), and you can also opt to make your own photo as a background for a bit more fun and personalization. The main menu is large, stylish and very easy to navigate. You can make a whole lot of custom settings to the thing including: 5 band custom equalizer (plus 8 presets), date/time display, customize the menu, playlists, 3 ways of viewing the song you're playing, and as I mentioned before you can program one of the buttons to do a number of different shortcuts.

My only gripe about the interface so far (and it's a very minor one) is that the auto scrolling isn't as smooth or as fast as it is with the ipods (via the slick scroll wheel), 2nd gen Zune (very nice accelerated scrolling), and the older Zen touch strips (where did they go, Creative??). That being said, you can still move around easily and fast enough, and there is an accelerated scroll function that kicks in after a couple seconds; it's just not as smooth as those others. But then again, it also costs half as much, and for all the features it gives you, I can't really complain too much for skimping on something.

Sound quality? Crystal clear. Especially after I customized the EQ. The bass on this sucker is thumping, and although there is a Bass-boost option in the sound settings, with the low end of the EQ boosted up a bit, I didn't need it, and when I did try turning it on, it actually ended up pushing it too far and started to distort. I tried out both the factory provided headphones (not bad sounding for freebies, by the way) and then plugged in my Sennheiser HD280 Pro headphones (An amazing set of cans, by the way, and a steal at 90 bucks for the quality they put out). The Zen made excellent use of the higher-grade headphones and had plenty of power to put the volume through (with a volume level from 1-25, I couldn't push it above 23 comfortably, so it gets plenty loud).

Video Quality: It will take me some time to really flesh out the capabilities of this thing as a video player, but the supplied video sample looks incredible on the screen. Is it a big screen? No. But that's the point. I plan on renting some tv shows and movies from Unbox when I travel next and see how it goes.

Phew. You'd think I'm on Creative's payroll or something (damn, I wish...). And although it may seem like I'm adamantly opposed to Apple no matter what, that's not really the case. They have their uses to the everyday consumer, and I actually recommend Macs for a lot of people (if they can afford it, that is). But I think they've been hyped up way beyond what they're worth, and the disgusting elitist cult following they've established is pretty damn sickening. Apple fanatics are truly the most aggravating idiots out there. You can't really be a "PC fanatic" because "PC" isn't really a brand, it's just a code structure. The closest equivalent might be a Sony fanatic since they're the only ones that make the full range of products that Apple does, but you really don't see too many of those people, and having anything Sony besides a PS3 won't put you in the center of any hipster circles.

Allright, I'm pretty sure I'm about to get slapped by Jobimoto on my feeble attempt at sports talk if I haven't already, so I'll go back to staring at my Zen and touching it inappropriately....

B-Spot Out

"Crime is rampant in these streets!"