It may look a bit droll next to the iPod Video, but looks can be deceiving: Sindre Lia reviews the Creative Zen Sleek, fitted with 20 GB of storage, support for WMA DRM and an FM radio.
Review summary of the Creative Zen Sleek:
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 A roomy 20 GB-capacity, great sound performance and user-friendly music library interaction make the Creative Zen Sleek a solid choice as a hard drive-based audio player. On the other hand, a mediocre battery life should be mentioned as a drawback. All in all, the Creative Zen Sleek comes highly recommended as an all-round performer with excellent sound performance across a multitude of genres; those in need of the latest and greatest multimedia features should look elsewhere. Release: July 2005. Price: $250.
Pros: Great audio performance; user-friendly music library interaction
Cons: Mediocre battery life; near-useless FM radio
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Full Creative Zen Sleek Review:
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Measuring 59 x 101 x 17.1 mm and weighing 157 g, the Creative Zen Sleek features a 2-inch monochrome LCD screen and a 20 GB hard drive capable of storing up to 10,000 songs. As revealed by the name, it's a sleek and good-looking audio player with an attractive silver casing and buttons. The Zen Sleek offers playback of MP3, WAV, WMA and WMA DRM - the latter of which enables support for online music stores such as Napster and Yahoo! Music.
Unlike the recently reviewed Zen Micro Photo, the Zen Sleek's touch strip provides excellent tactile feedback when set to 'Low sensitivity' via the System menu, which also harbours an Equalizer with a custom mode as well as eight preset modes, including Acoustic; Classical; Disco; Jazz; New Age; Pop; Rock and Vocal. The Music Library, another vital selection in the Zen Sleek's user-friendly menu, offers agile browsing by Albums, Artists, Genres and All tracks.
In use, the Creative Zen Sleek impressed us with a well-balanced musical landscape across all genres, although the bundled set of earphones may very well be less than ideal for some users due to its all-round nature; if you want more thump, you'd better give these the bump. Furthermore, Creative also saw fit to integrate a stereo FM radio into the Zen Sleek, but poor signal reception unfortunately proved to hamper the usability of this feature severely.
Connecting the Zen Sleek to a PC requires the installation of Creative's software package, which subsequently enables rapid and hassle-free media transfers. As a small bonus, WAV files created when using the recording abilities of the voice recorder and FM radio can also easily be transferred to the PC.
Creative claims a battery life of up to 18 hours for the Zen Sleek; we, on the other hand, experienced a battery life of approximately 10 hours during the test period.
Availability
The Creative Zen Sleek is currently available in Europe and North America, bearing price tags of approximately €250 EUR and $250 USD, respectively.
Price and availability
The Creative Zen Sleek will start selling for $250 () in July 2005.
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