August 10, 2005 - While Creative's massively successful Sound Blaster line of sound cards is essentially the industry standard audio solution for the PC, the company's audio playback lineup isn't entirely tethered to a personal computer. Creative's series of portable audio products, the Zen Micro, has been highly successful from both a critical and market standard, and its other Zen products haven't done too shabby either.

Creative's newest portable player is the Zen Vision, the follow-up to its Zen Portable Media Center. While the Zen Vision is similar to the PMC in a general respect to audio and video playback, the Zen Vision is basically an entire rewrite of Creative's take on a portable audio/video player.


One main component to this is that the Zen Vision does not follow Microsoft's Portable Media Center design, meaning that the new player has an entirely new, and non-Microsoft, user interface. The Vision sports the Plays for Sure logo, so it'll work with any music/video site conforming to that standard, like its predecessor.

Spec-wise, the system sports a 3.7" 640x480 262k color screen, Compact Flash I and II support, TV-out, an FM tuner and microphone. We think Creative forgot to ship the kitchen sink with our demo unit so we're not sure if that ships with it or not.

The Vision features 30GB of storage space, up to 13 hours of audio playback and 4.5 hours of video playback. An optional double-life battery is available as well that adds just a tad more size to the unit, but is hardly noticeable and doubles-up the battery length.

Interface
The Zen Vision's interface is quite simple and sports a couple neat tricks up its sleeve, though the interface isn't as nice as the Zen Portable Media Center's, for those who've used that. The starting menu gives you access to any of the device's main features, like music, photo or video playback, the FM radio, microphone for recording, built-in organizer and more.

Like an iPod, you're able to customize what you see on the main menu, so if you never want to use the organizer you can switch that off, or if you want one-click access to the albums list, you can turn that on. You can even change the order of the menu items, putting your most-used options at the top of the list. Neat.


A neat navigational feature throughout any of the alphanumeric listings (like by album or artist names) is that you can quickly skip through letters by skipping over to the right side of the interface. This makes navigating through massive file lists much easier and quicker. Pressing and holding either up or down to scroll through a listing will speed up over time, but navigating by the starting letter is a good bit easier.

The menus are navigated with the Zen Vision's squared directional pad on the right side of the player and items are chosen with the enclosed select button. The directional pad is functional though far from ideal. The space between the directions, the select button and the other buttons on the player are too close together, so it takes a somewhat concentrated effort to navigate the menus without pressing another button. Again, it's certainly usable but we wouldn't say it's good.

A nice part about the button layout is the back and option buttons located at the top of the button layout. The back button will quite simply send you back a menu, the same as on most any other player on the market, while the option button will give you a contextual menu for different playback modes, viewing options or whatever, depending on what you're doing. It's very convenient.