I’ve had an ipod mini for four years now and loved the thing to death. The problem is that my loyal little ipod is now broken, horrible static interupts my music due to some internal design flaw. So I have to upgrade, the question is do I get a 30 gig Zen vision: M from Creative or a 30 gig video ipod? Has any one had any experience with creative products? how do they measure up compared to the ipod fluid interface and design?
(please no apple bashing, also im only considering these two, not a zune, or a sansa, or gremlin, or anything eles)
well i personaly dont like ipods but am not gona bash them ither
the zens arent as sturdy as the ipods but they do work a bit better, starting from the interace down to the music quality
the ipods have horible tech support (based on my own experiance) and all of them are overhiped and arent that great, except for the part that they are waterproofish (laundry didnt kill mine)
I’ve had a Creative Vision:M for about a year and I love it. It supports far more filetypes than the iPod (still no .ogg though ugh), has a longer battery life (used to, don’t know about the new iPods), has a better screen, and a radio. Just for starters.
The iPod has evened things up a little with the release of the improved video iPods.
I recommend going to Best Buy or another similar store that has them out so that you can play around with them. Remember to try the Microsoft Zune and the really cool new Archos MP3 players as well.
It depends on what you do with it. If you have used the itunes music store then none of that music will play on anything but an ipod. That kinda sucks I’ll admit but that’s the reality of it and even other music players are following suit there. If not then you have a free choice between the two.
I personally would buy the ipod just because it looks the best IMO and it can be used as a hard drive to boot my computer. If you share music files with PC users then the Creative might be a better solution but you can always re-encode the audio.
I just checked out the Zen and I wondered what that horrible button was in the middle but it’s a touch pad. That is actually quite cool because I’ve always felt a vertical scroller made more sense than the ipod’s wheel. I’d have to see how it worked of course and I suggest you do the same. Go to a store where they have them to pick up and hold if you can.
creative can be used as a plug and play hardrive, and also you dont need to use any softwear (even thou they recomand) you can just drag and drop the files into the “/music/” folder without any hastle of conversion
speaking of the archos, they are good on the mp4 player side, dont know how good of an mp3 player they are, couze they are mostly used as a mobile DVRS and cost cheap as well (for what they come with at least)
I use itunes for my library but Im planning on switching over to songbird once it supports cd ripping, and device sync. (plus better playlist controls)
I dont purchase songs from itunes so thats not a problem.
The zune sounds great but its just not my style, I have no other explaination for not wanting it.
My really big concern with the creative player is that the interface is “clunky” or a pain to get used too.
i Bought a Zen vision M a couple months ago, and most my friends who are i-pod owners have now decided to get a Zen, Its got fantastic video quality, vivid colours, excellent usage within windows, as in you can use windows media player. win-amp, etc. to put music and videos on it, without having to use only one program (i-tunes). It also supports way more video files, Dvix, xvid, wmv, and so on… i am very happy with my zen vision m, sure it may be a bit thicker than an ipod, but i feel its an overall better player. And its got a removable disk feature where you can set part of the drive to be used in the exact same way as a “USB mass storage device” which is great if you have to take a very large file to work, you can set its capacity all the way up to 16GB.
I would suggest you go for the Creative Zen.
Edit : oh and despite all the negatives about navigation on a zen, its really easy to work, its just got a learning curve of about 1/2 hour, but hey, blender has a learning curve as well, and we have conquered it…
k i had a creative zen microphoto…not a vision i know but if u just wanan know a bit about creative… i loved it untill the battery started to go…6 months after uying it i could only get about a 3 hour battery life after a 5 hour charge… i thouhgt it was just a flaw byt then i fouind that 3 of my 4 friends that have them too had batterey problems so im not too sure about it… so i bought one of thenew ipod nanos and i like it much better…how ever they are prettym uch equal for sound quality and such but the ipods have 24 hour battery life now which is good …but i dont know a whole lot about the vision so i dunno ifi helped you or not