Audio

Like other PMPs, the Creative Zen Vision W has built-in audio playback software.  Luckily, thanks to the unit’s 30 or 60-gigabyte hard drive, you can store plenty of MP3 and WMA music.

Audio is organized just how you’d expect.  You can browse audio files by album, artist, track, genre or playlist, or you can set the unit to DJ mode and listen to your entire music collection at random. Using the W’s software, you can even create playlists without the need for a PC hookup, but the interface makes adding audio files a bit awkward, so this option will be an on-the-go last resort.

When listening to music, the unit displays artist, track and album information, and with a button press or two, you can view detailed information on the audio file.  You can also move forward and back within a song, but there is no sound during this process, so you’ll need some idea of where you’d like to go. 

The Vision W is also compatible with spoken-word content from Audible.com (quality formats 2 & 4), allowing you to transfer and playback audiobooks and periodical subscriptions.  The only problem with this feature is that the audiobooks are not organized in their own menu, so you have to search for them in other menus.

There’s nothing revolutionary in the audio playback system of the Zen Vision W.  If you’ve ever used an MP3 player, you won’t see anything you’ve never seen before.

 

Still Image

The Zen Vision W also has built-in image viewing and slideshow software.  The interface is folder-based, and as long as you group your photos by topic in folders, you’ll find the software easy to use.

You can choose to view photos manually, again by folder, or you can put the W in slideshow mode and view images as part of a presentation.  If you want to create elaborate slideshows, you’ll need to use the included Creative Media Explorer software on your PC, but you can view folder-content slideshows without the need for a computer.

Again, nothing here is out of the ordinary.  One note I would like to make in this section, however, is that the W sometimes rendered images very slowly.  For example, viewing a 42kb image takes almost five seconds to appear on the screen when selecting it from a menu.  Moving from photo to photo in slideshow mode was nearly instant, but manually opening and closing photos is needlessly slow.  Perhaps this shortcoming could be addressed with a firmware update.

FM Radio

The player’s built-in FM tuner is also accessed from the main menu.  You must have headphones or a patch cable plugged in to use the FM feature because the cord acts as the receiver’s antenna; this means you cannot listen to the radio with the onboard speaker. 

The FM radio screen provides information on the frequency as well as preset information.  You can save preset frequencies manually or use the Autoscan feature to find and save all receivable frequencies (up to 32), and even enter a name of your choosing for each preset.  The FM screen also provides a signal strength indicator, much like a cell phone, to let you know when a signal is particularly strong or weak.

The Zen Vision W has no FM recording capabilities, which is disappointing. 

 

Voice Recording

The Microphone feature allows you to record voice memos, lectures or meetings.  The mic is located on the top of the unit and provides quite clear recordings at close range.  Recordings are saved in the .WAV format rather than other, more efficient, audio formats supported by the palyer, but you can always transcode them later if need be.  You cannot name the audio files in the player’s software, though you can, of course, rename them once the W is connected to your PC.

 

Organizer

Like many of its contemporaries, the Zen Vision W has limited PIM (Personal Information Management) capabilities, and can sync your contacts, calendar and task entries from Microsoft Outlook so that you can have them on the go.  The feature is the most basic it could be and simply displays information as though it were contained within a text document.  The Sync Manager software (which must be installed on your PC to use the organizer function) can also sync with Outlook Express.  No word on Vista’s Windows Mail compatibility.  If you really want one device to keep up with your contacts and video files, get a Pocket PC.

 

Video

The same direct, no frills interface that drives the rest of the Zen Vision W’s software also powers the unit’s video playback.  Videos are subdivided into categories: Video, TV, ZENCasts, and Imported Files.  The categories are, in reality, folders, and videos will show up under the category that shares a name with the folder in which the video files are stored. 

Once you’ve selected a video for playback, you have few control options other than Play, Pause, Forward and Back.  By way of the Menu option, you can fit the video to screen, stretch to full, zoom to full or view the video in original size. 

 

My only complaint regarding the video interface is that you cannot see the video while fast-forwarding or rewinding within a video file.  For example, if you start a video at the beginning but want to fast-forward to a particular part of the video, you can only go by the time index; when rewinding or fast-forwarding within a video you don’t see an image on the screen.  This is certainly a software issue, and perhaps a minor one, but it makes it more difficult to find a particular point within a video.