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Strengths: Crisp, brilliant screen, 16.7 million colors, comes with premium set of Creative EP-830 Noise Isolating Earphones ($60 value), FM radio, recording, wi-fi, plays videos, SD card compatible, speakers
Weaknesses: No SD card integration, no metal parts, X-Fi sound enhancement is negligible, wireless chat needs to improve
Summary: The Creative Zen X-Fi, what an amazing little player. Pricing first: the Zen X-Fi 16GB has the same MSRP as the 8GB iPod Nano. Plus, the X-Fi has nice features such as FM radio, voice recording, SD card expandability, an external speaker, and premium earphones. The X-Fi also has wireless chat, but this needs to be improved with future updates as it is clumsy and not very intuitive. Sound quality wise, the X-Fi sounds GREAT. And this is just with the earphones, not with the X-Fi feature turned on. In fact, I felt that the X-Fi actually muffled the sound a bit--it did not improve sound quality in my opinion. The $60 noise-isolating EP-830 earphones are sufficient for one of the best sounding MP3 players out of the box, way better audio quality than a typical iPod's. Design wise, I thought this was a nice little improvement over last year's original Creative Zen. Creative Labs made the player less toy-like with the metallic paint on the back and the "chrome" surrounding the player. The only thing that bothered me was the nine main buttons--you only need four of them to navigate the player! The corner buttons are only there to help you move diagonally when you are typing using the chat function. The player is about 1 mm thicker than the original Zen, which had the thickness of a CD case. Still pretty thin and light, though. The screen itself is the most impressive thing on the player. IT HAS 16.7 MILLION COLORS! The Nano, for comparison, has 262,000. Pictures come out clean and crisp. Videos are bright and colorful. So how do you get everything into the player. Keep in mind that the software that comes with this player is OPTIONAL. For music and pictures, you can just drag and drop files into the player. I use Windows Media Player 11, and it gives me no troubles. For video, you will probably need to download Creative's Video Converter, which will convert pretty much any video file into a MP4 file that is compatible for the player. I converted a few videos, and I liked how the videos had decent quality and only used up a little space. One 20 minute episode took around a few hundred megabytes. Now for the cons. First off, as with the previous Zen, the new X-Fi still does not have SD card integration. This means that if you were to purchase, say, an 8GB SD card (which I did,) you would only be able to access the files you put into the memory stick from a specified "Memory Card" section--it does not integrate into your player's pre-existing library. But I guess that if you aren't big on expanding memory, then this should not be a problem. Another drawback is the online chat function. I have not yet tried this out extensively, but chatting seems very rather clumsy. The keypad is arranged similar to a phones, but instead of designating each of the NINE buttons to a three or four letters, the buttons act as a directional pad for you to navigate across the keypad. Okay, so to sum it up, despite some minor setbacks, the X-Fi's great price, awesome design, and plethora of extra features sealed the deal for me. In this day and age, the iPod has a lot more legit competitors who seem to improve every year. Creative Labs has come a long way with their MP3 players, and I feel that this one is a true alternative that will do its job and save you money. Hope this review helped! If you need to see some specs or technical stuff about the player, check out Creative Lab's website for more info!
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