Here is my review on Creative Zen Stone Plus 1 GB
But b4 that let me tell you how I ended up buying this one.quite irrelevant though….I was hearing “Barber Shop” from youtube with my regular Ipod earphones. For those who have heard the audio know that a good quality ear phone is a must to know the real beauty of the audio. For those who haven’t, please do hear it now on a good headphone. I took my frnds creative earphone and heard and was shocked by the quality of audio output. I decided to buy the head phone. I walked into Staples, Bangalore and asked if the earphone is available. Not to be. I them came across this pebble shaped beauty. I liked it a lot. I bought it without a second thought. A ear phone at Rs 400 seemed costly to me as compared to Rs 1900 for 1GB mp3 player:)
The packing was attractive. It said up to 500 songs and upto 9hrs playback. With 1GB and 500 songs? You mean each song under 2MB? Serious hit in the audio quality! Did it play for 9 hrs? Let’s see.
To start with the audio quality(mp3 functionality) coupled with great earphones is awesome. The display is small but don’t just write it off. Its very cute, powerful, bright and guarantees a 2nd look. This surely is among the strengths of the player. The FM reception admittedly is poor. On playback the menu responds slow. So is the data transfer. I wonder why it takes so much time to transfer data when its just a flash drive. I loaded the mp3 player with around 700 MB(approx 150 songs) mix of mp3 and wmv formats. Most of them were at 128 K bits/sec. The shuffle doesn’t work properly. And I mean it doesn’t shuffles songs. There seems to be some bias and it played some songs more than once where as some of them I didn’t even hear once. I was shocked to see that full charge played for just over 7hrs. That’s amazing battery life. It takes about 1.5hrs to charge fully. This small pebble is real dynamite.
If I had to compare it with Ipod Shuffle, I will tell creative is a clear winner. With almost or a lil less price you get a cute screen mp3 player with awesome sound output, fm player, stop watch and voice recorder(wont be used much though). Some how the earphones distributed with Ipod shuffle are very ordinary and lack the puch. The only plus you can make about Ipod is that it’s weightless. If u clip it in your sleeve you wont feel any weight. You may feel only the earphone weight. This one is quite bulkier in comparison. People may also argue on the ‘feel’ it carries. Shuffle has metallic(aluminum) feel where as this one is purely plastic. Shuffle also has a clip which is more that handy. Stone is blunt but pebbles are not supposed to have clips:)
All in all I feel Stone Plus is a great buy and true value for money.