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In August PCW featured an exclusive preview of Creative's Zen Portable Media Center (PMC). Three months on, the final version has hit the shelves.
Little has changed from the pre-production model featured in our preview. In fact, the only major modification is a small integrated speaker that provides adequate mono audio output. You can still get stereo output from the headphone socket.
The design of the Zen has been kept simple with basic navigation buttons, a few shortcut keys and a familiar Windows key. No matter where you are in the menus, you're only a few clicks away from playing the media you're after.
Creative says it's likely to produce higher capacity models soon, but at present you're stuck with a 20GB hard drive. This equates to around 75 hours of video in 320 x 240 wmv format.
Non-wmv files are converted before being transferred to the Zen PMC, but this can take some time - a 100MB DivX file took seven minutes to encode. TV and video must be transferred via a PC. Quality is fine for the small screen, but compression artefacts are noticeable.
At 353g, the PMC's heavier than an mp3 player or PDA, but still light enough to be truly portable; pack it in to your briefcase and you won't notice it's there. Meanwhile, battery life ranges from three hours when watching video, to between 12 and 14 hours for audio playback.
Being the first PMC device we've reviewed, it's hard to say whether or not Creative is going to be able to corner the market. Samsung will be releasing its version shortly, and a number of similar new devices that don't conform to the PMC standard are also expected to appear.
Contact: Creative
www.europe.creative.com
Specifications:
- 3.7in screen
- 20GB hard disk
- 12 hours audio playback
- Three hours video playback
- Video out
- 353g
- 144 x 81 x 27mm (w x h x d)
See also:
All Gadgets
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