Hey Bob, Well after spending a few hours now with the device I can honestly say that as a music and photo player it owns. Plays audio and images great, very quick and simple and works well.
Now for the not so great, you can't just connect the device and throw media on it... you have to install Creative's software. Once you do this, THEN you can just simply throw media on it. But beforwarned, putting your torrent downloads of tv shows just does not work. I tried to put the latest family guy on there and it gave an error about the resolution (havent tested more yet to see if it really is a codec issue or resolution size thing.. as in it needs 320x240 video or smaller). When you use creative's software to import the media it converts it to WMV 320x240 with whatever bitrate encoding you want.. i used 190kbit and it seemed to do it pretty fast... but honestly i was watching Hereoes :p. Okay, after all this.. let me just say how crappy Creative's ZenCast and SyncManager are.. they have crashed several several times. I made sure I used the auto update and am using the latest versions. I'm hoping that this is just pre-mature software that will get greatly improved as the weeks ahead. I used the seperate included Video Conversion tool outside any wizard type included program and WOW the display on the device is very clean. The device comes shipped at 50% brightness btw and its plently bright. I want to say that the display is VERY similar to the Sony PSP if you want something to go off of. I havent timed any conversions but I have a core 2 duo 3ghz box so I'm sure converting/transcoding wont take too long for tv shows but anyways going to mess with it some more and i'll report back.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Hey Bob,
Well after spending a few hours now with the device I can honestly say that as a music and photo player it owns. Plays audio and images great, very quick and simple and works well.
Now for the not so great, you can't just connect the device and throw media on it... you have to install Creative's software. Once you do this, THEN you can just simply throw media on it. But beforwarned, putting your torrent downloads of tv shows just does not work. I tried to put the latest family guy on there and it gave an error about the resolution (havent tested more yet to see if it really is a codec issue or resolution size thing.. as in it needs 320x240 video or smaller). When you use creative's software to import the media it converts it to WMV 320x240 with whatever bitrate encoding you want.. i used 190kbit and it seemed to do it pretty fast... but honestly i was watching Hereoes :p. Okay, after all this.. let me just say how crappy Creative's ZenCast and SyncManager are.. they have crashed several several times. I made sure I used the auto update and am using the latest versions. I'm hoping that this is just pre-mature software that will get greatly improved as the weeks ahead. I used the seperate included Video Conversion tool outside any wizard type included program and WOW the display on the device is very clean. The device comes shipped at 50% brightness btw and its plently bright. I want to say that the display is VERY similar to the Sony PSP if you want something to go off of. I havent timed any conversions but I have a core 2 duo 3ghz box so I'm sure converting/transcoding wont take too long for tv shows but anyways going to mess with it some more and i'll report back.
Thanks for the extra comments about the Zen... I really appreciate it.
As much as video is important, can you describe the audio aspects? Gapless playback? Sound quality? The menus portion of the Audio area?
If you could do that, that'd be awesome, as well as any other nuggets of goodness you can think of.
Thanks again for your thorough posts thus far - I appreciate it!