Creative Zen Touch

Posted by T3 Online on Mon 22 Oct 2007

Plenty of good ingredients thrown into a fat, ugly pot

It looks like Creative must have taken the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" maxim to heart.

Does a 20GB MP3 player with a touch-sensitive area for navigation and white-and-silver casing sound familiar? If so, then what about this - the Zen Touch's hold button even has bright orange underneath it! The bad news for the company is that it's still lagging behind, despite taking its inspiration from Apple's iPod (T3 104, 5/5).

Our big beef with the Touch is that it's too chunky for the average pocket. Virtually everyone - Sony, Rio, Philips and Apple - has offerings that outclass Creative's on the size front. And though the touchpad is a definite step forward for navigation, it's not as neat as the wheel on the iPod. We found ourselves longing for a button in the centre of the pad, rather than having to move our finger up to the top. Sadly, we found it impossible to master the "tap to select" touchpad option.

Other bum notes are the fact that you can't power the unit via USB, it doesn't show up as a standard external hard drive and the six buttons on the front protrude quite a lot.

Despite all that, this isn't a bad player. There's plenty of good stuff, not least of all an amazing 24-hour battery life that generally lives up to the claim, depending on what files you're playing. The sound quality's great and the unit's menu system is fast and easy. The Touch also works well with Windows Media Player 10 for file transfer, supports OD2 and Napster WMA downloads and is nifty for making playlists on the move. It's good, then, but definitely no iPod!