Well, I haven’t purchased it yet, but I will later today. Isn’t she hot?
Initially, I wanted an iPod Mini in green or the new iPod 20 GB color mode. I took the latter out of the running because, honestly, I’m just not going to look at CD covers and pictures of my kids on my MP3 player while on the train to work (I got a new job in DC and will be commuting daily). That just left the Mini. I crunched the numbers (read: flipped a coin) and decided in the long run a Creative Zen Neeon was the wiser choice. Actually, I had really decided on the Zen Micro. I didn’t like how it looked–it’s pretty ugly, but it was the only one on Amazon that rivaled the iPod Mini and that I would consider buying. I went to Creative’s site to read their forums, as suggested by one of the reviewers on Amazon, and discovered my baby. I fell in love instantly. She’s so sleek and chic!
The only decision I have to make now is what color device to buy. I think I’m going to let my five year old decide for me. He’s good at the kind of stuff.
I bought a Creative Nomad Jukebox (6g) when during Comdex years ago, before they were even on the market. I still have it, and it still works great.
I bought a Creative Nomad 2 Jukebox (64m internal memory 128m flash card memory, runs 10-12 hours on 1 AA battery) years ago, and it still works great.
The only issue I ever have with either one concerns the length of file names. All my song files are named “Artist-Album-Track #-Track Name” and some of them are too long for the player to handle. Other than that, no problems.
There’s a great website for Creative players called www.nomadness.net that actually has better driver software than the Creative website, too. Highly recommend it.
World Eater, Creative’s site sucks. It’s bloated and slow. Try going to their home page, www.creative.com. My player’s right on the front page, in the middle. Click it and behold its super awesome coolness.
Nurse Carmen, I don’t know which Zen your neighbor got, but the Neeon, stupid name notwithstanding, is smaller than the iPod Mini. The Mini’s dimentions are 3.6" x 2 x .5. I’m not sure what the Neeon’s exact measurements are (for some reason I can’t get to creative.com at the moment), but its smaller than the Mini.
Plus, I really dig the idea of having a player very few people will have for a while. It just became available in the States, apparently.
I got the Creative MuVo Micro N200 1GB about a month ago.
I was jazzed with it initially, but have become concerned. I downloaded the firmware from February this year to fix a problem with static during songs, and it worked on that. I found that it started to eat batteries very quickly, then found out that the unit was simply turning off at (apparently) random times. There was a new firmware upgrade at the beginning of August which is supposed to address that, plus some feature upgrades. The features are nice, but the power management is worse. I am in the process of measuring the battery voltage when the failures occur, and determining any conditions and sending them on to the company.
I like the size of the unit and the drag and drop ability of the interface, but this power thing is really annoying. I got about another 8 hours of listening out of the last battery after it first started turning off. I don’t know if other models suffer the same symptoms.
I bet your neighbor has the Zen Xtra, which I have too (60gig model). It is quite a bit bigger than an iPod, but it still fits in my pocket just fine and costs quite a bit less than the 60gig iPod. Plus, it supports the .wma format that netlibrary uses, so I can download/borrow audiobooks for free.