Review: Creative Zen Micro
| January 12th, 2008It’s late, I’m bored and thinking of Marmite, so it’s time for another review of Bad Tech I Have Brought. This week: the Creative Zen Micro.
I didn’t actually buy the Creative Zen Player for myself. I brought it for my Grandfather, at his express order. He used to get the John Lewis catalogue of tech toys, and he pointed at the Creative Zen and said words to the effect of “bring me back this one, it looks nifty”.
Being from an earlier generation, he was still impressed with the fact that you could store huge amounts of songs on it’s eight gig hard drive. That was where his impressed-ness ended, as everything after that pissed him off.
His computer wasn’t able to run the software that came bundled with the player, and I ended up ripping his small collection of CD’s with my Mac, and then uploading to it using the open source XNJB - and we all know how much fun FLOSS/FOSS stuff is.
But for once, it’s unfair to blame the Open Source community for a bad user experience. Creative have managed to make an object almost unusable for the purpose it was designed. Let’s start off by looking at the case of the unit -
See that screen? See how it’s nearly as big as all the buttons on the screen, but not quite? That would be fine, but all the buttons are touch-sensitive. So every time you touch the surface of the object, you trigger the unit into doing something, or the screen.
This stunning setback to user-friendlyness was only dwarfed by one thing - the user interface. Never have I seen an interface so unfriendly. It practically sets the dogs on you as soon as you press the menu button (which isn’t a menu button, but actually a context-activate button which offers you a drop-down menu from which you can select the top menu to take you to the music menu to take you to the ‘now playing’ menu).
As if the unit wasn’t bad enough, it also tries to do an number of extra things as badly as possible. It has a radio receiver, that doesn’t pick up radio very well owing to electromagnetic interference from the unit. It records sound, but only using the bad inbuilt microphone. It can operate as a hard-drive, but only under some conditions. And you can use it to show your photographs on, if you can ever work out how to transfer your data across to it when not in hard-drive mode.
Eventually, my grandfather gave up on this device, for the reasons outlined above, and it’s rubbish battery life. (It’s supposed to charge from USB, but it really means USB 2.0 charging only.) He gave it to me, and I’ve tried to give it away to other people. As yet, no joy. However, I recently came across a method for getting the hard-drive out, which keeps me going on those long train journeys when I feel like destroying this particular hand-held device, as it might be the only thing worth doing with it.