Digital Trends

Creative Labs Zen Micro 5GB January 23rd, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Performance

Although the Zen Micro comes with a USB 2.0 interface, we found music transfer to be much slower than we expected and noticeably slower than other hard drive based music players we have tested in the past.  We transferred the same album to both the iPod Mini and the Zen Micro, and the results where surprising.  They both use USB 2.0, but the Zen Micro seemed like it was transferring at USB 1.0 speeds.  The iPod Mini took about 2 seconds to transfer each song, where the Zen Micro took between 8 to 10 seconds per song, depending on size.

The ear buds that come with the Zen Micro are of very high quality and probably the best sounding ear buds to come packaged with any audio player out there. The player itself features a 98dB SNR (signal to noise ratio) according to Creative Labs, although we are not sure of power output levels.  Unfortunately for as good as the ear buds sound, they physically hurt our ears after an hour of prolonged use. We had several people try them out and everyone found the size of the ear buds just too large to use for long periods of time — a shame for sure.

The 10 different equalizer settings do a good job of distinguishing the various genres of music out there. We were able to noticeably hear changes in our music when changing the equalizer settings from one setting to another. Bass is adequate when playing techno or hip-hop music in “pop” mode and acoustic guitars sound very life-life when the equalizer is in acoustic mode for example.

Creative Labs rates the battery life of their Zen Micro at 12 hours of use in between charges. Initially we found this to be pretty accurate with about 10-11 hours of use before we had to charge our unit. What we also found out was after about a month and a half of use that we were lucky to get 4 hours out of the battery before we had to charge it. Creative uses lithium-ion battery packs, but for some reason our batteries would drain very quickly. We even left the player plugged into its charger for a day and a half, and then unplugged it to see if it could keep its charge. After three days of simply sitting there and not in use, our test unit was drained dry. We tried this on two separate Zen Micro players just to be sure, and they both did this. Hopefully Creative finds a fix or there will be a lot of upset people out there.

The battery is replaceable

Something of particular annoyance is that the Zen Micro has a tendency of locking up during normal use.  We experienced many lock-ups just trying to turn the player off, where it goes into a permanent shutting down cycle.  Removing the battery was the only way of getting the player to shutdown, even after leaving the player in this shutdown state for hours.  The fact that the player can frequently lockup just shutting down is a severe issue.  This could cause your data and music to become corrupt when removing the battery.

Conclusion

There is a reason why the iPod reigns supreme; it simply works as it says it will. Apple has made us upset with their unwillingness to support software other than iTunes and we were really hoping the Creative Labs Zen Micro would be a good alternative, but it just left us feeling let down. If you read any other reviews both in print publication and on the web, you will be led to believe that the Zen Micro is the iPod killer we have all been waiting for, but it isn't. We have to wonder if these other publications even tested the Zen Micro before writing a review. After testing two different players and using them for a couple months, the flaws in the Zen Micro were very obvious to us.

Creative Labs has a couple problems they need to address before they can stand to compete with others in this market. First of all, something is draining the battery life from its player at increased rates, both when it's being used and when it's powered off. Getting four hours of battery life from a 12-hour battery is inexcusable. Secondly, while we love the audio quality from their ear buds, they are too big to use for long periods and will make your ears very sore. Lastly, Creative needs to polish their own MediaSource software and work on software compatibility with other Media Players like RealPlayer and MusicMatch. Here is our suggestion for Creative Labs: make a hard drive based digital audio player with only a few polished features and make sure it works well. Throwing in everything but the kitchen sink shouldn't automatically mean it's the best, it has to work correctly first.

*Images courtesy of Creative Labs