The minute Zen Micro from Creative receives an OLED screen and ups storage capacity to 8 GB as part of its Photo makeover; Sindre Lia investigates whether its beauty is skin deep.
Review summary of the Creative Zen Micro Photo:
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 Harbouring an intriguing OLED colour display and good-looking, intuitive menu system, the Creative Zen Micro Photo is at first sight a must-have audio player. Unfortunately, an overly sensitive touchpad, a mediocre battery life and poor bass performance bluntly decapitates this player’s potential for excellent overall performance. For those who want a small, HDD-based audio player with roomy storage and favour music that doesn’t go bump in the night, though, the Creative Zen Micro Photo comes recommended. Release: October 2005. Price: $250.
Pros: Colourful OLED display; slick and rapid user interface
Cons: Poor bass performance; mediocre battery life; overly sensitive touchpad
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Full Creative Zen Micro Photo Review:
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Sporting a 1.5" 262K colour OLED display and a 8 GB hard drive capable of storing up to 4,000 songs, the Creative Zen Micro Photo aims high as a mid-range HDD audio player. Sitting perfectly in ones hand, its slightly oval-shaped, metallic casing also harbours an FM radio and a photo album application. Bearing all these features in mind, we're pleasantly surprised by the 115 g and 51 x 83 x 17.2 mm measurements and broad format support: MP3, WMA, PlaysForSure, WAV and IMA ADPCM are on board for audio as well as JPEG for photos.
A user-friendly and slick colour menu with Music library, Now playing and System as vital selections enables access and playback of stored audio files. The music library offers browsing by Artist, Album, Genres, and All tracks, while System offers an Equalizer with eight preset modes, including Acoustic, Classical, Disco, New Age, Vocal, Pop, Rock, and Jazz.
Unfortunately, the Zen Micro Photo struggled somewhat in the area of sound performance as it handled bass poorly. This issue was to a certain extent solved when using another pair of earphones - but alas, this in turn lead to a significant loss of gain.
The Zen Micro Photo also includes a Photo Album application and an FM radio, both of which struck us as being mostly useless - and especially so the radio with its poor signal reception. The Photo Album, meanwhile, proved quick and responsive, but was greatly hampered by the miniscule display of the (somewhat ironically named) Micro Photo.
Connecting the Zen Micro Photo to a PC turned out to require installation of Creative's software package, which then enabled use of the USB 2.0 port as a charger for the Li-Ion battery. High notes here include rapid transfer speeds and hassle-free transfer of WAV files created by the voice recorder of the unit.
Creative claims a battery life of up to 15 hours for the Zen Micro Photo; we, on the other hand, experienced a battery life of approximately 10 hours during the test period.
Availability
The Creative Zen Micro Photo is now available in Europe and North America, selling for $250 USD and €300 EUR, respectively.
Price and availability
The Creative Zen Micro Photo will start selling for $250 () in October 2005.
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