First Impressions: Creative Zen Sleek 20GB
Saturday / 03 September 05
I had been looking for an appropriate MP3 player for a while now. It had to be HD based, small, light, durable batteries and easy to use. On top of that, I wanted something that looked nice and came with extras such as a FM tuner.
What did I pick? The Creative Zen Sleek 20GB.
UPDATE: I have made the drivers I talk about available below.
Creative Zen Sleek: An Introduction
Like most modern players, Creative’s new multiformat HD MP3 player has 20GB of storage joy, advertised 18 hours of battery life and a touchpad for quick menu navigation, along with a blue backlight, FM tuner, voice/radio recording, equalizer, some PDA-functionality and a USB2.0 connection, supporting MP3, WAV, WMA and WMA with DRM 9 and 10. Oh, it’s selling for a nice 250-260 euro.
Nothing special, right? Right.
Build Quality
Build quality is important. We’re dealing with a hard disk here, so we don’t want it to fall apart after some days of using it. So, I was happy to see that the Sleek feels and looks very good. It comes in a brushed aluminum casing combined with white and large, grey buttons. The aluminum makes the player feel very robust and perfectly capable of surviving some accidents.
The plastic area covering the 2 inch LCD screen looks a bit cheap, but that’s primarily caused by the thick protection layer on top of it. It’s not something that is bothering me though, because all in all it looks very nice.
The Interface
The buttons and the touchpad are the player’s main interface and do the job very well. People have complained about the high sensitivity of the touchpad, but this setting is customizable and should offer the right setting for everyone. One way or another, the touchpad does require a couple of minutes of getting used to, but after that I was flying through the menu’s.
As a laptop user, I am quite comfortable with the way touchpads work — for example, tapping the touchpad enters the currently selected item. The button in the lower left corner allows you to go back one step in your history (not up one level in the menu hierarchy) and by holding it you’ll go to the root level right away. Finally, on top of the Sleek is a hold button to disable the buttons and touchpad.
Browsing your music library is the same as most players. You can view it by album, artist, genre, load a playlist or bookmark. If you’re one of those indecisive people you can let the Sleek’s DJ choose for you, or play music using selections such as “Most Popular”, “Rarely Heard” or “Album of the Day”.
A very nice feature is the ability to completely customize the main menu by adding, removing and reordering the items on the screen. The default items are no reason to use this feature right away though, but it’s nice to see that I can.
It works quick, easy and without any problems.
Transferring Music
Easily one of the most important aspects of a player is the usability of transferring music to the player. As with many manufacturers, Creative also tries to make you believe you actually need the software they ship the Sleek with. Having never owned a MP3 player before, it must be said that I felt very uncomfortable with not knowing what is needed and what isn’t. Marketing, I guess?
The Sleek ships with two software packages: Zen Media Explorer and Creative MediaSource. The former is basically an Explorer shell extension putting functionality — think of things like viewing your music and data, or syncing the calendar, tasks and contacts with Outlook — of the Sleek at an easily accessible place. Creative MediaSource is similar to Windows Media Player 10 by offering playback and libraries, but focusing on organizing and transferring your music instead. Unless you intend to use the basic PDA-functionality that’s available in the Sleek, you can safely refrain from installing both packages. I know I will stick to WMP10.
What you do need are drivers. Yes, unfortunately one downside of the Sleek so far. The current firmware 1.00.05 does not make it instantly recognizable as removable storage. Of course, this does not mean it won’t ever be with future firmware versions, as some other Creative models have received this welcome functionality in firmware upgrades.
17:11 GMT: Apparentely I was half mistaken in the previous paragraph. It is possible to connect the Creative Zen Sleek as a removable storage device, but it will only affect the data partition. Your music won’t be visible and transfering music to it still requires the drivers.
Anyone that has just purchased or is planning to purchase a Creative Zen Sleek and now wonders about the installation of the drivers — you can find them on the CD at \Drivers\<language>\Drv_Jb3.exe. Launch the executable and you’re done. After installation a separate removable storage like drive will appear on your system through which you can use the Sleek as with any removable storage.
Sound Quality (and earbuds)
Creative’s players have always been one of the best players on the market in terms of sound quality. The Sleek is no exception and I am very satisfied with the sound. I listen to a lot of hardstyle and techno, so good bass is important to me.
It must be said that you are going to need to use good headphones or earbuds with it. The ones that come with the Sleek are .. crap. They seem to have adopted the ergonomic properties of a cactus. I haven’t even bothered to check their sound quality, but I’ve read that it’s not the best either. Before purchase I had already decided to use my 13 euro Sony earbuds, which are brilliant.
Battery Life & Recharging
The Sleek is advertised to last 18 hours on a single battery charge, of course, highly depending on your usage. Considering these are just first impressions and the fact I haven’t even gone through one battery charge yet, I can’t say too much about it. What I can say is that by applying some maths, it does seem as if that claim isn’t just marketing talk. On another note, recharging only takes two hours.
Other Functionality
I briefly mentioned PDA-functionality, such as a calendar, tasks and contacts — all syncable with Outlook. You can’t add, edit or remove of any these from the player itself, thankfully. Whether it uses an open format and can be synced with software like iCal or others is something I don’t know and honestly don’t care about. Viva la paper agenda’s!
The Creative Zen Sleek also sports voice and radio recording and the ability to bookmark a location in a song (or Podcast), of which the latter might come in handy for some people.
No Colorscreen?
No, the Creative Zen Sleek does not have a colorscreen. Do I really care? No. Why not? Well, the primary use of a MP3 player is listening to the sound it produces. Occassionally one might use the screen to look at the interface trying to perform a certain task, but a (lack of) colorscreen won’t affect your ability to accomplish it. It only makes you giggle like a little schoolgirl anyway. ;-)
Why not an iPod?
Perhaps one of the most common questions people have thrown in my general direction this month is: why not get an iPod? Well, as much as I like Apple’s design, I am simply not that impressed with the iPod. It’s a good player like most other modern players, but I won’t jump right on it due to its sexy, white looks and the cute little, shiny Apple on the back.
The Creative Zen Sleek is smaller, lighter, has longer battery life, larger screen and comes with more features that appeal to me than an iPod. It’s just a matter of elimination.
Conclusion
Teh sleek (did I just say that?)! No, really. It’s a wonderful player doing everything I expected in a very, very good way. It even surprised me with some features, such as menu customization and bookmarks. That’s said by someone who’s not easily satisfied and aims for perfection.
Retailing for about 250 euro in Dutch stores I feel it’s quite a good price/quality ratio. With the likelihood of the price dropping significantly in a couple of months for the holiday season, it only makes it nicer.
The decision to buy the Sleek was much easier than actually getting my hands on one, because the player has not officially made it to the shelves in The Netherlands yet — has been available in the UK for a while now and only recently in the USA. You should be able to find some units in some online retailers by now.
1Dom posted:
04 September 05, 08:50:01 AM
Quote - "It only makes you giggle like a little schoolgirl anyway. ;-)"
Maybe it is better you get the Zen then, over an iPod.. Don't want to get beaten up while walking through Amsterdam's late night streets now, do you? ;)
:P
It seems a lot less expensive than an iPod, too?
Dom