iPod & MP3 Player Review

Great MP3 player - won't work with Vista (2009-02-05)
This is a great MP3 player. Mine is still working great, however, it won't work with Vista. Creative lists it as not supported anymore, meaning they are not developing drivers so it will work with vista. So if you have Vista, don't waste your money.

First MP3 player (2009-01-06)
This was the first MP3 player I ever owned. I bought the product back in 2004 due to the large HD size. Initially I was impressed. Good sound and easy to use. However, within the first month it died. I had to send it in for repair and I received it back within 3 weeks. It was up and running for 3 months and then it again fell into disrepair. I decided not to get the product repaired. Again, when the product was up and running it had very good sound and was intuitive. But the reliability was poor.

Creative Nomad Zen Xtra (2007-08-07)
I just received this MP3 player and I am very pleased with the performance of the player. There is only one item I would have a complaint is that the battery is not very large and because of that the player is not very effiecient if you are uploading music to the player from the computer. You need to keep the player plugged in when you do this process.

There have been a lot of complaints on the Creative Organizer here. I personally do not feel that there is anything hard about using it. A little experimentation with file ripping will tell you what settings you need to make to properly file your MP3's. There is other organizers for the player. Notmad is one that comes to mind.

Either way the player is wonderful and with 60gb you can carry quite a selection of music or audio books.

Buggy to the end (2007-07-20)
This player demonstrated software bugs through its life, often refusing to transfer files to and from the player. Now, only 2 years after purchase, it has reverted to booting up to recovery mode only. Contacts with Creative customer service inform me that since it is out of warranty, I can pay them $28/hr to communicate with me on the issue with no guarantee that they'll actually fix it. Of course, long distance charges may apply. No thanks.

not what i thought ! (2007-05-16)
The player has a great sound quality and support many music formats but lacks of many many things:
* Bulky
* The Dial is not comfortably placed and not easy to use
* cannot be detected as a mass storage device like Ipod for data storage. it needs a peacial software to see it in "my computer". and that means you have to carry the CD with you all the time if you intend to go around with it (data traveling) yet you still cannot use it as a hard disk. it operates as a storage device. it means if you want to open a file stored on it, you have to transfer it back to your pc. (The worst of all)
* Not durable at all. it fell down from my bed to the ground and it was in its protecting pouch and the internal hard disk is damaged !!! all my data all my music library all my life, gone with the wind. some few players out there like some HD5 senses the fall and immediately takes the head off the disk to keep it safe and protect the data from harm.
* no good support from creative.
* lack of accessories. The cover suffer from scratches and wanted to replace it. guess what !! No covers sold separately !

*** the good thing about it, is that the internal hard disk is a 2.5" HDD (laptop HDD). in another words, you can replace it with a new one or even a bigger space one if you want. in my case i changed the damaged 60GB HDD with a new 80GB HDD and waaalllaaaa ... i have a new MP3 player.