Review: Creative Zen X-Fi music player

The Zen X-Fi is named after Creative's most expensive range of soundcards, which are sold on their high-quality sound. The Zen X-Fi, then, has a lot to live up to.

It is a small player, a little smaller than a pack of cards, and a little thinner too. There is a panel of nine buttons to the right of the screen, but confusingly none are labelled.

After using the power/hold switch on the back the screen lights up and the buttons can be used to navigate the menus.

It turns out that the top-middle and bottom-middle buttons are for going up and down, just like on a computer's numeric keypad. But those functions and the others change depending on which menu and which mode the player is in.

It's confusing at first but it's fairly easy to get used to with a little practice. The first few times, though, we found ourselves getting lost in menus, and it's often hard to figure out what button to press to get a certain function.

Otherwise, the menus are good and they work fast, even with large music collections (the buttons change again when browsing a list of songs, artists, or other things, allowing fast scrolling with one set of buttons and single-line scrolling with another). The 16GB storage on our review model can take around 4,000 songs or about 30 hours of internet video, and there's an SD memory card slot for expansion.

The player can also make recordings, play FM radio as well as video, although you'll need to convert this first using the supplied software. Music can be dragged and dropped into the player using Windows or most media player software. It plays MP3, WMA, audiobook and AAC (iPod) formats – although it will not play music bought from iTunes – and most common video formats.

There's a small built-in speaker, the quality of which is fair, but it's not very loud. The supplied earphones, though, are in-ear models and work very well. Quality is still not as good as a £20 pair from a decent manufacturer, but it's a step up from the usual terrible earphones supplied with players.

The Zen X-Fi can access wireless networks for streaming media if you have a suitably set-up PC, and it can be used to access Creative's chat site, although that's pretty useless unless all your friends own the same player. It can't browse the web or be used for email unlike the iPod Touch.

Sound quality from the Zen X-Fi was certainly impressive, and, all in all, it's a very good player, although the wireless aspect isn't all it's cracked up to be.

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