Creative Zen X-Fi

The Creative Zen X-Fi is Creative’s latest addition to its MP3 Player family. The new Zen X-Fi is believed to be the replacement to the Creative Zen PMP. It is almost similar to the Zen with respect to the dimensions, weight etc and sports a much more stylish design. It is available in capacities of 8 GB, 16 GB and 32 GB. It competes directly with Apple’s iPod Nano and offers much more in terms of features. We review the Zen X-Fi and check whether it makes the cut.

Creative Zen X-Fi Specs

• Capacity: 16GB / 32GB
• Dimensions: 83mm x 55mm x 12.8mm
• Weight: 68.75gm
• Display: 2.5″ 16.7 M colors TFT LCD, 320 x 240 pixels
• Battery Life: 36 hrs Audio playback, 5 hrs Video playback
• Video Formats: MJPEG, WMV9, MPED4-SP, DivX 4/5 and XviD
• Audio Formats: MP3, WMA, AAC4 (.m4a), WAV (ADPCM), Audible 4
• Image Formats: JPEG / BMP/ GIF / PNG / TIFF
• Battery: Built-in Li-ion battery
• FM Radio: 32 preset stations
• EQ Settings: 8 presets and 5 band custom EQ
• Organizer: Calendar, Contact, Task List
• Wireless: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with WEP, WPA, WPA2
• Connectivity: USB 2.0, SD connection

Other features: Power Charging, Album Art, Voice Recording

Price: 16 GB - $199, 32 GB - $279.

Design and Interface:

The Creative Zen X-Fi is a very sleek and stylish DAP with dimensions of just 83mm x 55mm x 12.8mm and weighs in at just around 70 gms. This makes it very portable and easy to carry. It has superb build quality and feels sturdy and tough. It is fully built of plastic but has a metallic look and feel about it. The black version looks fully metallic and is good to handle. The 2.5″ 16 M color screen is slightly better than that of the Creative Zen and supports resolutions of 320 x 240 px. It is bright and vibrant with great viewing angles.

The user interface is the same old Zen’s with some new features integrated into it. It is one of the most intuitive and easy to use interfaces you will come across. You can also configure the menus to your liking and edit Menu items. The controls are very good, but there are too many buttons. It feels a bit cramped and it would have been better had Creative included a 5 way DPad as in the Zen. But its still very much usable and you can get used to it easily.

It supports Windows XP and Vista out of the box but doesn’t support Linux or Mac unless you install some hacks. You can simply drag and drop your music and video files into your Creative Zen or use any Media Player like Windows Media player or Winamp. It also comes with the new “Creative Centrale” software to manage your multimedia collection and sync data and update the firmware. It also includes a video converter for the Zen X-Fi.

The Creative Zen X-Fi supports expandable memory by way of SD card support but the memory card integration is not at all good. You can just access the files in the SD card but without any of the gallery or extra features just like in the Zen. The internal memory and external memory are clearly separated with the files in internal memory getting all the good treatment and features while the files in the external memory get neglected.

Audio and Video playback:

The Creative Zen X-Fi has superb sound quality and lives up to its family name. It is one of the best DAPs in the market when it comes to sound quality and can easily satisfy the hungry ears of most audiophiles. It does lag behind the Cowon’s but easily trumps out all of the iPods. What adds to the music playback is the inclusion of the Creative EP 830 earphones which are better than most other bundled earphones out there.

It also includes X-Fi which is Creative’s proprietary sound enhancing technology that improves the overall sound quality to a great extent by reshaping waveforms from lossless music. It comes with two settings - Crystallize and Expand. The music does sound a bit artificial and synthetic but X-Fi is a great feature, no doubt. The Creative Zen X-Fi also comes with a built in speaker which has a good volume and sound quality with nearly zero distortion.

The Video experience on the Zen X-Fi is very similar to Zen. It offers smooth video playback with no lag. It supports almost the same video codecs and formats as the old Zen - MJPEG, WMV9, MPED4-SP, DivX 4/5 and XviD. All other formats must be transcoded to the following formats at the 320 x 240 px resolution. The best tool for the conversion would be Creative Centrale. The 2.5″ 16 M color screen has good brightness and contrast levels, wider viewing angles.

Other Features:

The Creative Zen X-Fi also has Wi-Fi support and can connect to other wireless networks easily. You can share media content with other computers over the Wi-Fi network. Creative has also included a Chat feature in the Zen X-Fi usoing which you can chat with your friends over the Creative Chat network. It doesn’t include support for multitasking which means that you can’t do anything else while you are online. The Zen X-Fi also has very rudimentary texting support with no predictive text feature. It also includes no support for the major chat protocols like Yahoo, Gtalk, MSN etc which makes the Chat feature pretty unusable at this time.

The Creative Zen also includes other features like FM Radio, Voice recording, Photo Viewer and Organiser. Most of them are almost the same as the old Zen’s. The FM radio has decent reception and has the auto scan feature to automatically scan and store radio stations. You can view JPEG images in various modes like lists, thumbnails etc in the inbuilt Photo Viewer. You can also create slideshows with your images. The Voice recording feature can record audio and save recorded files as low bitrate WAV files. It also has shortcuts to start recording fast. The Organiser includes Contacts, calendar and to-do lists all of which can be synced with Creative Centrale.

The battery life of the Creative Zen X-Fi is officially rated at 35 hrs for audio and 5 hrs for video. It lasts about 2 days with medium usage with about 12 to 14 hrs of music and about 2.5 hrs of video. The battery drains off much quickly when Wi-Fi is in use.

Pros

• Nice bundled headphones
• Great build quality
• Superb sound quality with X-Fi
• Wi-Fi, FM radio, Organizer

Cons

• No Linux, Mac support
• Poor SD implementation
• Poor Chat software
• Primitive Text input

Conclusion:

The Creative Zen X-Fi is a great buy at just $199 for the 16 GB version and $279 for the 32 GB version. It includes a whole new array of features, some of which may be poorly implemented but are great to have, nevertheless. Most of them can be improved easily by a firmware update. It is a great replacement to the Zen with some glitches.

Rating: 3.75 / 5