Review of Creative Zen Stone Plus

The Creative Zen Stone Plus comes in a choice of colours and has an attractive smooth flat pebble design.

It is very lightweight and comes with 2GB of memory.

At the click of a few buttons you have access to a stopwatch, FM radio with presets or a microphone.

Other features include a cue & review feature which is intended to help in finding a place by listening to snippets as you cue through a track. The effect is interesting, but didn't prove very useful in actual practice.

The display is fairly good and at full contrast is easy to read in all conditions except bright sunlight.

 

One real problem is file navigation. Even when scanning through a large folder, you only see one filename at a time.

Furthermore the display shows only about a dozen characters from each title which is not enough to differentiate between, for instance, one Harry Potter novel and another let alone between the individual tracks and chapters. For a device with 2GB worth of space this is disappointing.

The player works with MP3, Audible, WMA and WMA DRM 9 formats and has a large number of playback modes, but not a sleep mode.

The battery is internal and is recharged via USB. Initial charging was 3 hours, but after this the player was easy to keep charged by regular USB docking.

The screen is 64 x 64 pixels.

The highest volume level may be insufficient to allow you to listen to an audiobook in a moderately noisey background environment.

The player is managed via Creative Media Lite software which needs to be downloaded from the Creative website.

All in all a cool looking player, with lots of features, but lacking in some basic areas.