Needless to say, the traffic going to the venue was extra-terrible! Good thing I brought along the Creative Zen Vision I was reviewing. Watching a few episodes of “Everybody Loves Raymond” on it entertained us enough to not notice the extra-long travel time.

Creative Zen Vision

Portable media devices that play video are nothing new. For years, manufacturers have been trying to convince us that we should take our videos wherever we needed to be. Several gadgets have come out with this aim but it was only when Apple launched its 5th generation iPod (a.k.a. iPod Video) that consumers started paying more attention to these gadgets.

Creative is a company which has long been known for its pc sound cards and, more recently, mp3 players. The Zen Vision is its latest attempt to keep pace with its rivals in the portable media player arena.

I fell in love with the Zen Vision the moment I laid my eyes on it. Its sleek charcoal magnesium exterior is cool to the touch. At about the same size as a regular PDA, it fitted snugly on my palm. As soon as I fired it up, the Zen Vision’s ultra-wide LCD screen was quick to impress with sharp, clear pictures and colors. The viewing angle is somewhat small but with picture quality this crisp, I wasn’t too much interested in pointing it anywhere but to myself.

Navigating the Zen is a snap. Sorting through large music libraries is not a problem thanks to an alphabetic directory which allows you to jump ahead instead of scrolling down through every track in your library. Even novices should have no trouble making sense of its Back, Menu, Up, Down, Left, Right, Play, Forward, and Reverse buttons.

Interestingly, like an iPod, the main menu can be customized to your liking – hiding items you don’t necessarily want and adding others that you do. Neat!

The Zen Vision’s main selling point is its screen. The 3.7”, 640X480, 262k color screen delivers incredibly crisp and colorful videos. The display is very sharp and very bright that it can actually be used under the sun. I have never seen my favorite movies look so vibrant on a portable device. The pictures which I viewed on it actually looked better than in print! Amazing!

As a music player, the Zen Vision offers the usual amenities and then some: on-device playlist creation, shuffle and repeat modes, eight equalizer presets and five custom settings, and bass boost.

It is worth noting that the Zen Vision can output audio to a stereo or video to a TV using the included RCA patch cable. What it can’t do is record from external sources such as TV or DVD players. The only recording option is through the built-in microphone which can record up to 10-hours worth of voice saved as 128kbps WAV files.

The Zen Vision’s built-in speaker is better than I expected. To compare, listening through it was far better than listening through any mobile phone’s external speaker. The included earbuds were also a pleasant surprise. For once, I didn’t have to reach for my favorite headphones to fully enjoy the advantages of digital audio.

Another feature which I found surprisingly useful was the Zen Vision’s CompactFlash card slot. Through it, I was able to transfer, view, and make slideshows of my digital photos wherever I was – without the aid of a pc. Cool!

Other features include a 32 preset FM radio, PDA functions like contacts, to-do tasks, and calendar, and it can also function as a 1GB storage disk.

I have to mention that I found the Zen Vision’s manual insufficient. Almost everything I needed to know about it I had to discover on the device itself while the technical details I got from the internet.

From the net, I found out that the Zen Vision can read most common media formats including AVI, DivX, MPEG, motion-JPEG, and WMV video formats, MP3, WMA, WAV, and DRM audio formats, and JPEG format for photos. Its 30GB storage capacity means that it can hold up to 120 hours of video, or 15,000 songs, or tens of thousands of photos.

Ironically, Creative also claims that the rechargeable lithium-ion battery has enough juice to power a measly 12 hours of music or 4.5 hours of video. From my own informal tests, the battery lasted an average of 8 hours of music or almost 4 hours of video. The way I see it, these figures are too low for a portable device.

The bundled file management application, the Zen Media Explorer, is a pretty decent piece of software. Everything works as simple and as smoothly as should be. There is nothing revolutionary about it but it serves its purpose very well.

The Creative Zen Vision is a very nice all-around portable media option. Music playback is awesome – some of the best you’ll find in a portable device. If you can get used to the limited viewing angle, it can indeed turn into a mobile entertainment center. Everything else it has, it does pretty well.