Tim Rayburn
Tim Rayburn
Lead with grace and be wholly you.

Creative ZEN V Plus

image Recently the time had come to upgrade my MP3 player.  For Christmas I had gotten a Video iPod from my wonderful wife, but it was stolen a short time later from my truck and I've been without a portable MP3 player since then.  Well a new client was suddenly a 45 minute commute, one way, and that sealed the deal that it was time to get something which I could use to travel with Audible books.  Enter the Creative Zen V Plus.

Having learned from my mistake, I was not going to spent another several hundred dollars on a device, the goal was less than 100 dollars with the requirements that it play Audible, store at least 1 gigabyte, and be reliable.  The Zen V Plus more than fit the bill, for just over $75 dollars you can get:

  • 2 gigabytes of storage
  • FM Tuner
  • Audio Recorder (with Built In Microphone)
  • Line-In Audio Recorder
  • VIDEO player on 1.5" screen (Low Res, but any video is a plus)
  • Simple and easy to follow interface

Now overall I've loved the device, but there are a few things I wish it did better.  The biggest is that a couple of times it has lost the place in my Audiobook when it did an idle shutdown.  You know, you pause because you need to focus on work for a bit, and then hours later come back but in the meantime after 30 minutes of no action it shutdown.  This is to me somewhat unforgiveable, but I've been able to work around it for the most part, hopeful a future firmware upgrade will address this.  Overall, 4 out of 5 stars.