Creative Zen regrets?

A few months ago I bought a 1GB Creative Zen Nano Plus, and it’s really nice. It plays .mp3 and .wma files; has a built-in FM radio; mp3 encoding from line-in and a built-in microphone. It works really well but there are a couple of drawbacks:

  • You need a cable to connect it to a PC (my last mp3 player plugged directly into the USB port)
  • It doesn’t play .ogg files
  • There’s no “lock” switch, it’s software based, which is really annoying, slow and awkward
  • If you knock the jog switch in the middle of a three hour audio file, it moves to the next track, so you have to move back to the start of your three hour file and fast forward through until you get back to where you were

All I use is the mp3 playback and I had to re-encode some of my .ogg files to mp3 for this, which was quite annoying, but at the time there just weren’t any decent players which supported ogg. Now there’s the Samsung YP-U2.

At £61 for the 1GB version, it’s slightly more expensive than the current value of my Nano Plus (£56), but much cheaper than what I originally paid. It plays back both mp3 and ogg, has a hardware “lock” and plugs directly into a USB port. If it had been out at the time, this is what I would have bought.

However, the Nokia N91 is now on the scene, which is not just a phone, but a Wifi mp3 and ogg player with a 4GB hard disk. The odds of me upgrading to this from my Nokia 6630 are at the moment quite high (although it won’t happen until the wedding and honeymoon are over), and my mp3 player will likely be relegated to gym duty.

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