Creative have been well known for delivering high quality MP3 players in a wide variety of colours, but their latest Zen is a departure. The Zen comes only in black and seeks to provide both excellent portable music and excellent video in a single device. As such it makes an ideal gift for those who like their portable media t come in sleek popular consumer electronic format.

Creative’s Zen is easily detected as a removable hard drive so transferring music to the device is as easy as drag and drop. It doesn’t have the greatest support for video formats, but includes software to convert videos to the correct format, which helps immensely, especially when the intended recipient isn’t particularly tech-saavy. It also features an FM Radio, for those who make a habit of tuning in, and a user-modifiable equaliser. The advanced features are there to be toyed with should the user know what they are doing. As well as the usual features such as photo browsing and setting images as the device’s wallpaper users can rate songs on the fly and expand the internal memory with SD cards. With models ranging from 4GB to 16GB the Zen is reasonably equipped to store both music and videos.

The Creative Zen is a good example of a portable media player that focuses neither on music or video to the extent that other features lose out. Such a versatile media player would be at home with anyone who has used Creative’s line of Zen players or someone unable to decide which they like better, portable music or videos.