Creative Zen Vision:M Review

In my decades long experience in the technology field I have found that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, better for producing exciting, innovative and quality new products than a viscous rivalry between two big companies.

Sure it may mean that not everybody will play nice all of the time, ala Microsoft and Netscape or AMD and Intel, but generally speaking when there is a technology arms race the real winners are consumers. More innovation as well as price wars tend to keep the players on their feet and the consumer happy.

As with the browser and chip wars, the field of handheld multimedia players is being driven primarily by the two opposing titans of the business, Apple and Creative. Creative originally entered the field of MP3 players before Apple, but it was the iPod from the company we were more used to getting Mac's from that really exploded the market and brought it into the mainstream.

Despite the fact that Apple has managed to shift more than double the amount of iPod's to Creative's media players the audio giant has not been hesitant to come down the mountain with its own offerings. The Zen Vision:M is the latest in Creative's line of iPod-beaters, directly challenging the latest generation of video iPod's.

On paper the Vision:M certainly looks impressive when compared to its fruity competition, leading with a similarly sized 2.5in, 320x240 resolution screen that goes on to trounce the iPod's 65,536 colours on screen with 262,144 if its own.

Unlike the iPod, which comes in both 60GB and 30GB variants, the Zen Vision:M only comes in a 30GB flavour, but in itself this shouldn't be a deal breaker for most people in the market for this kind of product. It makes up for the lack of size variety with far more format support: the Vision:M will play MPEG-4, WMV, Motion JPEG, DivX, and XviD videos out of the box to the iPod's singular MPEG-4 video support.

Creative also promises 4 hours of video playback to the video iPod's rather stingy 2 hours, a claim we'll be investigating later in the review. As well as video the Vision:M doubles up as an audio player, picture viewer, FM radio, voice recorder and, should you need it to fulfil the rather eclectic role, a personal organiser.