ultimatenoob

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gnomad2 is the program used to interface with Creative mp3 players, and it works quite well, albeit in a basic way. The only trouble i have had with mine is sometimes the "Ok" button double-clicks, clearing your playlist to play only what you clicked on to add to your playlist, but thats rather infrequent. A close friend of mine has one and her touchpad scrolls down non-stop now, and customer service said she will have to pay for shipping it there, and potentially for service (around $40 total i believe she said) which she is rather disgruntled about.

The headphones that come with are pretty nice, but rather uncomfortable. The charger is similar to a laptop power cable, with a box in the middle thats kind of annoying, but you can also charge it via USB. One mistake i've found is that to charge by USB you must have the Zen turned off, and if you forget to turn it off while plugged into your computer, it will drain its battery instead of turning off automatically.

Also, the firmware has not been updated in almost a year, and there are some pretty silly mistakes in it right now: any band with "The" infront of their name is put under the T section, so trying to quickly put on The Greyboy Allstars is rather challenging. Also, you can set a clock in the settings, but the only way to actually *view* it is by going to same screen you set it on. Weird, eh?

The Zen comes with a carrying case that is pretty nice, but you cannot put it into it without the 'hold' engaged, because you will either skip the track your on, or press 'random play all', and you cannot access any of the buttons with it in the case.

All in all, i love the thing, especially the fact that I do not have an I-Pod, which, i respect as a decent mp3 player, but a friend of mine made an interesting statement about it the other day:

"Zen's are like the Linux of mp3 players: people use windows because they dont know theres anything else out there that could be or, even is, better."

Shondar

I've had the Zen for about 8 months now and am satisfied enough with it. The music quality is good, the battery lasts reasonably well (when you've turned the backlight to 5sec or off) and the 20Gb is big enough. It's a sturdy little machine that has taken it's share of bouncing, falling, and bumpy car rides and has only frozed to the point of needing a hard reboot twice. One of my biggest cons was that I couldn't sync in Linux, but I just emerged Gnomad and it works flawlessly...

Cons: I'm very unsatisfied with the touchpad. I had to turn the tap/click off because it was too jumpy and even then trying to scroll to one particular artist has me bouncing around above and below a few times before I get it... very very annoying.