Having already seen how Creative has miniaturized its audio players (in the form of the Zen Stone and Zen Stone Plus), it didn't come as a surprise when the company first told it would be introducing a smaller version of its Zen Vision portable media player (PMP). However, when the actual player arrived in our Labs recently, we were amazed at its small, slim form factor despite a 2.5-inch color display. What's even more remarkable is that the Zen Digital Media Player sports pretty much all the features you can find on the Zen Vision:M, plus support for iTunes Plus and an onboard SD card slot for added storage capacity.

Pros

This Zen's biggest asset has to be its pocket-friendly dimensions. Possibly Creative's smallest portable media player to date, the unit measures just 55 x 83 x 11.3mm, giving it a footprint no larger than a credit card. At 65g, its weight is also a mere fraction of its Zen Vision predecessors. All in all, we felt the handy size of the Zen PMP makes it a breeze to carry around and this will undoubtedly be its strongest draw as a portable entertainment device to both genders.

For such a tiny player, Creative has packed its PMP to the brim with features. In addition to music playback and FM radio, the Zen is compatible with various native video formats (including DivX, XviD and WMV9 codecs) and can also be used to view movies as well as photos on its bright 2.5-inch QVGA display.

During our brief hands-on with the Zen, we found the screen delivering on its claimed sharpness and brightness. Video playback was crisp yet smooth, allowing even small details to be seen clearly. Audio reproduction generally sounded rich with good high-end details and low-end response. However, as with most music players, you won't get the best sound quality out of the bundled earphones. We liked that there are options for video clips to be automatically converted to a compatible format for the player, but the conversion process using the installed software could take a while depending on the size of the file.

What caught our attention, though, is the inclusion of an SD card slot. Besides allowing the PMP to hold more storage externally, it's really convenient now to add content to the player without having to go through the Creative software on a PC. A "Removable Disk" option lets you double the Zen as an SD card reader. But the best part has to be Creative's choice of the SD media which is so affordable these days, you can easily customize the type of content you want on your player by simply carrying a few cards. According to a company representative, the Zen supports the new SDHC format, too, meaning you can add higher-capacity cards in the future.

Being US-centric, Creative has enabled its newest offering to support DRM-free music from iTunes Plus, which is all good provided you can get hold of a stored value iTunes card or a credit card with billing address to the countries where iTune Stores are available. Other frills onboard the Zen are a microphone for voice recordings, USB 2.0 connection, built-in equalizer settings, alarm, basic organizer functions, photo viewer, album art and wallpapers. There's also a shortcut button that lets you jump straight to a pre-assigned function.

We weren't able to fully test the battery life at this point. However, based on our previous experience with Creative players, this should hit close to the rated 25 hours of audio playback and 5 hours of video playback, which is very impressive for such a tiny PMP.

Cons

While the user interface of the Zen player was generally responsive and intuitive, we found our test unit somewhat sluggish in accessing content (especially video and images) on the SD card. It also took an average of 9 seconds to start up the player, which might be a tad longer than some people would tolerate. (Note: These are just initial observations of the player. Creative has assured that a firmware upgrade will be made available very soon for our review unit, and we hope to have an update on this soon.)

Our biggest gripe with the Zen, however, is that it cannot be used as a USB mass storage device (or at least that's what we found out from the user manual). Everything, it seems, can be transferred into the player only via the Creative Media Explorer application which has to be installed on a PC. SD card content cannot be copied or moved between the media and player, either.

As much as we liked the elegant piano-black finish of the Zen, the glossy display surface was a natural magnet for oil and fingerprints. From time to time, we found ourselves having to wipe down the front fascia for smudge-free viewing. And we may be nitpicking here, but the maximum onboard storage capacity of 16GB is rather limiting for a PMP, especially if one is planning to store mainly video files. Music reproduction is also constrained to the 3.5mm audio jack since there is no onboard speaker.

Bottomline

The cliché, that good things come in little packages, certainly appears to apply here. Despite some glitches we stumbled upon, the combination of a strong feature set and pocket-sized form factor puts the Zen Digital Media Player as one of the best and most promising offerings from Creative in recent years. Available only in black, the 4GB version will retail for S$249 (US$163.99), while the 8GB version priced at S$100 (US$65.01) more come September. A 16GB version is expected to sell at S$499 (US$328.02) from the middle of September.