Creative Zen Touch Description and Review

The Zen Touch has been superceded by the Creative Zen Sleek 20GB.

Over the last few years the Creative Zens have been evolving. This is the pinnacle so far. The new 1.8 inch hard drive technology that this unit is based around means that the Zen Touch is smaller and lighter than any previous Zen model. The Zen Touch's most obvious new feature is the linear touch-sensitive pad controller that it takes its name from.

The Zen touch is beautiful in both design and function. It is very small, very light and very stylish. Like most of the 2004 models to the point of actively being pleasing to the eye, not just a nice gadget - something actively desirable.

Unlike the iPod with its rotary touch sensitive pad, the Zen Touch uses a linear touch sensitive pad - up and down versus round and round, if you like. The interface has been reworked to go with the touch slider and it makes accessing and general control of your music a much faster and altogether more pleasing affair.

Any weak points?

The unit, as with previous models, is controlled by Creative's home made software. Don't worry, there are alternatives.

As this Player appears to have been modeled, at least in some respects, on the iPod it should not come as a surprise to find that there is no line-in, or line out, which means no recording and no easy connection to external PA systems.

Those of you with a keen eye will spot the WMA lie - similar to those found in other people's sales pages/ manufacturer's marketing material. 10,000 WMAs vs 5,000 MP3 songs on a 20GB machine? The true figure for 20GBs worth of music is about 6 - 7000 songs of about 3 mins each of MP3. For MP3 the simple rule of thumb is 1 mins music equals approx. 1 MB used - that's MP3 at 128Kbps.

At the rate of 10,000 songs for 20,000MB that means that each song would average only 2 mins long (20,000/ 10,000 = 2)- in fairness to Creative they do claim the 10,000 songs are WMAs at 98Kbps (more tightly packed, therefore taking up less space). If you encode at 98Kbps you get up to about 8,500 songs of approximately 3 mins each. In order to get 10,000 songs they have to average less than 2:40 each, which really requires some stretch of the imagination. What's wrong with telling the truth? 8,500 songs is a perfectly respectable amount of music to carry in your pocket. Lying to consumers is insulting. Fortunately marketing departments don't build jukeboxes, so that's the end of our griping.

Navigate your music collection with astonishing ease and speed. Play all day and all night nonstop with the incredible 24 hour battery life, up to three times that offered by other players. Combine this with 20GB capacity to hold up to 8,500 songs, and your musical journey need never be cut short.

Regardless of how many tracks you have there are some advantages to having the Zen Touch. Not only does it have on-the-fly play list creation/ editing features, as has become normal in jukeboxes of late, it also has a very handy search function, so that you can find the bloody tune you're looking for rather than trying to figure out where you left it. This may be supremely lazy, but being lazy can be fun. As we said with the 4th generation iPod, once your brain has learned that you can navigate without lifting your digits from button to button, and additionally with the Zen touch, find what you want without actively seeking it manually, your brain doesn't want to go back.

The Touch allows you to carry data, etc. as all good HD Jukeboxes do. The signal to noise ratio, something we don't dwell on too much here as it's a bit above our heads, is claimed to be as good as expensive HiFi systems, but in all fairness if we just look at the figure of 97dB its about the same as the competition. We don't know a jukebox that sounds bad and if we did, we wouldn't sell it.

WMA with DRM - that is "locked" or protected music can also be played on the Touch.

Battery news:

Creative have always had the jump on the other manufacturers when it comes to battery life and the Zen Touch marks another leap in the best direction possible: up to 24 hours battery life from a single charge. That's about 22 hours in reality, and the actual time may vary greatly with the battery life, but it's still nuts.

Now if you listen to your Zen Touch for 4 hours a day or so, e.g. in the commute to and from work, plus gym time, you only have to recharge the Zen Touch's batteries once a week!

Or, if you have to fly from London to Sydney, and suffer from chronic insomnia, you can listen to your Zen Touch for the entire flight (bar take off and landing, of course) without running out of juice.

It's pretty; it's pretty cool and if you want one just click below...