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August 21, 2008

Creative Zen X-Fi review

Product Code: 70PF2420001F5

The Creative Zen X-Fi is beyond question a better all-around digital music player than any of Apple's current iPods.

The Creative Zen X-Fi has better sound, superb headphones, an amazing feature set, expandable storage via an SD card slot, an easy-to-use interface that will please users who don't want to work with a touchscreen, and - here's the kicker - the ability to stream and download music from your PC wirelessly. It looks great, too, and it costs about half as much as Apple's current Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch players.

The 16GB X-Fi sells for £149. And if that sounds like a bargain, consider that you can also expand the Creative Zen X-Fi player's storage capacity by up to 32GB, thanks to its SD Card slot.

A few features differentiate the Creative Zen X-Fi from the competition. Not only can you download music, video, and images wirelessly from your home computer to the player, but you can also stream media from your computer, from Creative's servers (which offer podcasts and free music), or from a computer on an open network.

Plus, you can fine-tune the already superb sound with the Creative Zen X-Fi's five-band EQ settings; save voice recordings; listen to FM radio; and enjoy the listening experience right out of the box without buying new headphones, thanks to the surprisingly good-sounding Creative EP-830 earbuds included with the unit. The earbuds, which Creative sells separately, fit snugly in the listeners' ears, and provide clear low-end audio, with midrange treble that aren't tinny.

Creative's highly touted X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity Audio playback goes far in helping this player sound amazing. Its signal-to-noise ratio of 83 dB is second only to the SanDisk Sansa Connect's 84 dB in our tests. And the X-Fi earned the best rating of any player we've tested in terms of harmonic distortion and noise - at a barely registering 0.01 percent.

What does that mean for your ears? Creative's X-Fi technology, coupled with the great out-of-the-box earbuds, delivered very deep, clean, well-defined audio. The player supports AAC, MP3, WAV, and WMA formats, as well as Audible audiobooks. You get an on-board speaker as well, but it pumps tinny, clock-radio-quality sound out of its single, small speaker.

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Independent customer reviews from

Creative Zen X-Fi scored:
8.0 out of 10 100% real reviews

The 2 most helpful reviews based on 10 reviews:

02 Apr 2009 Fred, Southampton

7

Good Points

The sound and video quality are excellent, the earphones are of outstanding quality and the player looks good.

Bad Points

Much too small. They wanted it small and they overdid it. It would have been much cleverer too make an updated and slim (ipod-like) version of the Zen Vision: M. The buttons are really tiny and you can feel the other buttons on the edge of your finger when you press one, and also, they are hard to press. Again, why get rid of the scrolling touch sensitive button that worked so well on the Vision:M? The screen could have been bigger The casing has a very cheap plastic feel to it. The FM transmitter in my car keeps loosing the signal when I play non music stuff like podcasts. The sd card slot is useless since the contents of the card can't be integrated to the library. The wireless facility is fairly useless too, its software is user-unfriendly and transferring files wirelessly takes for ever. There is no browser and no bluetooth. The power button is on the back of the thing which makes it highly unpractical if you want to protect the player in a leather case. You can't charge the thing if you don't have a USB port handy, and the battery life is appalling. The ol' Vision:M is ugly and bulky by current standards, but I am getting one back!

12 Jan 2009 Mike, Leicester

3

Good Points

nice design and value for money

Bad Points

getting a charger for it, onlt charges through the PC unless you buy an expensive creative charger. Also battery life was poor!

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Creative Zen X-Fi

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