The Creative Zen Sleek
By Ryan Block 
posted June 30th 2005 2:00PM
posted June 30th 2005 2:00PM
We could do a little without the devices named with adjectives, but no denying Creative's new Zen Sleek is just that—for a Creative device, anyway. But you're going to love this: the Sleek is the first player in its class to not only feature similar specs to the full-size iPod, but to trump it in both size and weight: at 10.1 x 5.9 x 1.7cm (vs 10.4 x 6.1 x 1.6cm) and 157g (vs 167g). Sure, it doesn't have a color screen and we don't know if it's mass-storage compliant, but did we mention the 20GB USB 2.0 device will also have an FM tuner, 16 hour playback, WMA PlaysForSure support, and built-in mic recording? iPod, move over, we're calling this.
Ok....im just going to say it....Ipods, suck! Why go in a circle when you can go strait up or down? (Shortest distance to anything is a strait line right?) I used an ipod for 4 months and got tired of the thing because Itunes sucks, no wma, and just "ok" sound quality to me, and average battery life. Oh and of course all the dumbys at my work being like "woahhhh an ipod!!" But ooo wait all the ipods now have color screens, allthough noone notices that if u view photos on it, you get a ton less battery time. Anyways who wants to look at pictures while they listen to music? Everyone says "well the ipod is soooo small" Guess what? My zen touch is not much bigger, and i broke my ipod just droping it from about 3 feet, ive droped my touch like 10 times from 5 feet or more onto tile floor, and it has dents quarter an inch deep, and it still works. Thats why i have a zen touch, flash player dependablity, better, faster, interface for searching music, "touch to select" makes you be able to selct music freaking fast. Random button which is very cool. I like the hold switch more. Both a "back" and "menu" button. Battery life is longest of any player ( at least longer than an ipod)twice as much batter life. I really think it does look better than an ipod, expecially with that scratcy backside of it. Better sound quality. And when people say "woah is that the new ipod?" I can say no you dip its a zen touch.
well i own a zen touch and i love it in everyway i just wish it was a little smaller and its coming round to upgrade time and i was gonna go with an ipod photo but i think i'll be going with this instead.
well im buying an Mp3 player, and i want to buy an ipod mini but my dad said that creative had more mp3 players better than ipod and less expensive so now im choosing between ipod and creative (zen) I want something as small as ipod mini or ipod and have better features than ipod and that's affortable. since my budget is only $200 to $250 could u guys tell me which creative Mp3 i should buy or i should just go with the ipod mini
I've got a zen touch, the original model. I've had it for about a year now. I think the quality is great - I've also dropped it a number of times, and it's covered in scuffs and dents but it keeps on going. It's not that big, it's not that heavy either. The sound quality is brilliant and that it plays a number of different formats is great, even though I only use MP3s. However, the touch strip navigation is absolutely awful. It's horrible, horrible. Doesn't work very well, it's too sensitive - even with it on low sensitivity. I rarely, if ever, manage to select the song or artist I'm after without missing it by a selection or two. I've learned to live with it as I've no plans of getting a new one but the interface absolutely and completely sucks.
Pinay503:
Get a Sony NW-HD5
Hey Pinay503...I also have a Creative Zen Touch, and I have to say, it is one of the best units that I have had, fast transfers and music selections, decent headphones, outstanding sound quality, stellar battery life, not to mention a bulletproof design make that player a winner...if it can survive falling off the dash of my frieght truck onto blacktop pavement multiple times, it can survive just about anything in daily usage. As far as this player, it looks like another winner from Creative. Contrary to "popular" belief, I think that after like 20min of adapting, the touchpad is very intuitive, and the transfer software from Creative, although not the best, is very capable. but that's just my 2 cents.
anyone know when the zen sleek is supposed to be out in the us? the article says july, but i've yet to find it at any retailer.
g'day from Australia
just like to say that I can't wait for this player comes out over here
it looks great, has the features i want and if it can live up to its statistics then i'm sold
price will be an issue but i think i'd be willing to pay just over $400 AUD (ipod colour screen 20gb goes for $450 AUD)
one thing i dont like - you pick a song and you have to choose what to do, an ipod just gets on with things and plays it.
When will the Zen Sleek be ready to ship in the US?
The Zen Sleek is currently available in the US, its priced at 249.99 at most retailers. (www.bestbuy.com)
"one thing i dont like - you pick a song and you have to choose what to do, an ipod just gets on with things and plays it."
If it works the same way as the Zen Touch, you can just press play and it loads all the songs you're currently viewing as the Now Playing-list (replacing the ones who eventually are there already) and starts playing the one that was highlighted.
Why are you people such fools bar the few enlightened ones! The sleek sounds better, is lighter, has longer battery life and in my opinion looks better. What more do you want from a MP3 player. It seems that this only matters to the true music lovers. People just buy the ipod as fashion accessories.
G'day from Australia. I am thinking about purchasing the Zen Sleek. I'm not interested in hype and I am not very technical. I want a device that can act as a back-up for my mp3 music collection. Will the Zen Sleek do this? ie. Can I move mp3 files from the Zen Sleek back to my computer if the hard drive carshes? I don't want to steal music but knowing I can get the files back again would be a feature I would like.
Also, all my mp3 files are at maximum 320kps. What would this do to the battery life?
This thing looks amazing. i like the FM radio recording. With a good signal thats like having your own free music store. creative always has amazing sound quality and EAX audio rocks, and i dont even mind the software they ship, because i never need to use it. winamp works great for me. im not sure if they are using eax with this one but i would be suprised of they didnt. and for those who think the ipod is better..... my 30 gb zen xtra is multiple times better than that ....... thing. all the ipod has going for it is it looks cool because of its selling point, the click wheel, which is hell to use. i actually might have broken my xtra by "accident" to have an excuse to get this, but i just got a new battery for it. this will defiantely be my next player.
What is your issue with creative? Creative was in the audio game long before apple! I have a zen micro, never had a problem with it, scroll bar is fine for those of us that don't have fat nerd-thumbs. I'm planning on purchasing a zen sleek in the near future! iPods have low battery life and crap software! Drag and drop all the way for me, stop hiding in mummy's basement and find something better to do with your time that bitch about creative...jeees!
I don't understand all the people that have never used the zen sleek before bitching about it. It's smaller than an ipod, it's a little heavier (but that's a good thing...it's got a lot of aluminium on it, if you drop it it'll do more damage to the floor unlike the flimsy smashable plastic ipods), it's battery life is superior to an ipod. plus it doesn't have a stupid wheel scroll (what's that all about?).
The software with the zen is great however the one downside is a computer must have the software installed to recognise the device (no quick and simple usb drive useage here. Sound quality is also better than an ipod. Ogg support would be great also.
If you're going to get an mp3 player, get this.
for a simple reason: it's the better than those over-priced, over-rated fashion accessories known as ipods.
I just purchased this and I would like to say the batter life sound quality and features are all fantastic, especially compared to the ipod. One point I would like to clear up is that it does have easy mass storage, you can set an amount to appear like a flash drive and plug it in and you can also just browse the player itself with windows. You're all right ogg would be nice though.
Have had my Sleek for about 3 weeks now and absolutely love it. Feels good in the hand, dead easy to use, like the design. Very quick to set up, quick firmware update allows it to use Napster to Go.
Battery life very good.
Menu is simple and straightforward. Solid construction. Downsides - earphones are not the best I've come across and sometimes the speed of track access is not great - particularly if just playing an album straight you would think each track would quickly load - but not always the case. I had downloaded some Eddie Izzard and the audio (as it is on the CD) should be seemless, but sometimes had a wait of 5-10 secs between tracks.
Other than that - it's a much better buy than an idud (sic)
This thing is amazing! Just its looks alone are something to brag about! The radio actually works better than i had expected, and the size is great too. The sound quallity can be compaired to BOSE or THX. I definately like this product way more than iPod!
I bought my Zen Sleek about three weeks ago when I went on a hunt for a new DAP.
What can I say, this thing is AWESOME! Yeah, Ok, you can't just PnP the thing, it needs drivers but when the drivers are installed the functionality is amazing. Being able to sync your Sleek back to the PC is a great touch when I've been raiding a mate's music collection.
I'm impaired in my right ear and the quality of sound on this device is unbelievable.
If you're wondering whether to pick up an iPod or a Sleek, go Creative baby! Once you gone Sleek, you never go back...
Oh, and the up-to-8GB-removable-drive? Did you know (if your mobo supports it) you can BOOT off the damn thing? No for real, you can put an image of XP on there and you've got a completely portable System recovery device. That's worth the price alone!
hey guys and gals,
My impression of ipod is a fad. Im never going to put or look at photos or watch movies or whatever the ehll you can do with those things. battery drain would be huge. show pictures on my phone anyway. Gosh. Click wheel's pretty cool though, very basic, but not enough varience for me.
anyway, now crative. i like the look of the Sleek. It does not have a click wheel because of patenents and crap, so STFU about lookking like an ipod copy. It looks somewhat similar because of shape, (not going to be too musch varience unless manufactures go into multi sided polygons, super gay.) and also bacasue of brushed aluminum. So waht, its used becasue it looks nice.
Too many ipods, want something with big storage, huge battery life, lots of formats to play, and a non color screen. This seems to fit ofr me. I did look at a micro, but to fragile , this seems much more durable.
I think i will like the sleek, also the nano, (who wants to squint to see a super tiny color screen of pictures, maybe the photo, but no the nano?
wahtever, my input, hope no one gets to pissed off, if you do go cry to your mummy.
one more thing about other markets of players, that hd-5 thing looks pretty wired anf bubbly and just plain wierd. iRiver has that wired indented scrool wheel, and out of curiosity, why the hell do others use "i" before their name. iPod staterd it dont copy asswipes.
some other players aer just wired looking, and look very unfunctional like that buble button thingy. I have tiny fingers and that looks like youd hit everytihng atonce.
Can anyone tell me what the difference is between the Zen Touch and the Zen Sleek? Would you recommend one over the other?
I think its great. I upgraded the softwaare supplied from Creative.com and everything works great. Songs load fast. The FM tuner is great. The mic feature is also nice. People that have compliants should read the user manual. Most compliants I heard of can be solved there.
At first it was the perfect mp3 player - but the over-sensitive copywrite protection is obserd - will not recognize my own imported cd's as "licenced" and diliberatly distorts them with skips - this is music I paid for! I would go else where - not paying for my music twice!
Hi everyone,
For those of you who were wondering, the removable disk option is uber easy to configure; all you do is go to Extras > Removable Disk and set the capacity anywhere from 512MB to 16GB.
The best part is that you don't even need a computer to enable it! Within literally seconds it was ready to go and I was able to plug it into my PC and immediately start transfering files.
Windows XP/2k machines automatically recgonise it as a Removable Disk drive (just like a thumb drive) and configure it for you (I've noticed that Win2k has everything ready to go a few seconds faster than XP. I haven't yet tested it on Windows 9x, though).
One thing you have to do though is select the Removable Disk option in the player every time you want to utilise it or else the PC will recgonise it as just an MP3 player.
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A feature I love that's also lacking in the iPod is the Menu button on the bottom right that reminds me of right-clicking in Windows. When in the Main Menu, clicking it brings up some options to reorganize it's layout to suit your needs. Pressing it while in Now Playing brings up a menu that lets you View Details on a song, such as Genre, Biterate, and Play Count. Very useful indeed. Other options include bookmarking the position in a song (useful for long tracks), saving the song to a playlist, deleting it from the player, and looking up all songs on the player from the same artist. Also whatever menu you're in, you can just press that menu button and adjust the volume. The menu button is a very nice as well as essential feature that the iPod doesn't have.
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If anyone's worried about FM reception, don't worry, I live a good twenty minutes from the next major city (Phoenix), and reception's great. However, I owned a Zen Micro before I returned it to get the Sleek, and I found the Micro's reception to be very poor (might've had a bad unit). By the way, the antenna is the headphone cable, so don't try to record anything from the radio without headphones plugged in 'cuz all you'll get is static.
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The voice recording feature is nice, but remember, it's good for nothing more than just voice. I did manage to record an electric guitar solo inside a high school gym; however don't expect high quality because one, you can only record at 64kbps, and two, the recording clips and makes annoying blips if what you're recording is too loud.
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Now I guess I should actually mention a bit about listening to mp3s on this, since that's probably the main reason you are interested in an mp3 player. Let me just tell you this, the quality is phenomenal, five to one against the iPod. With a much higher signal to noise ratio than the Pod's, I was able to crank this baby to max volume (which is very loud, let me tell you), and hear absolutely no distortion. In fact, the sound quality is so good, that I started ripping all my mp3s to 192k and above because I could easily hear the decrease of quality due to compression in 128k mp3s! In fact, I've gone as far as ripping some of my favourite songs as WAV because the Zen Sleek brings out every single detail of my music! Mind you, I was listening to all my music with the stock buds for a long time and could still hear the difference. Upgrade to high-end buds, such as the Etymotic ER-6i, and prepare to be blown away!
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Be aware, though, that the Sleek isn't perfect. After just a couple weeks of owning a Sleek, I noticed dust getting caught under the screen. However, a quick gust from a can of electronics-safe compressed air fixed the problem. Real minor issue.
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All in all, the underapreciated Zen Sleek owns the iPod in all categories. Don't get sucked into buying the $300+ iPod just because everyone else has one; I got my Zen Sleek for $200 USD at Best Buy and I couldn't be more satisified.
I got one for christmas, and it only works with windows xp.