UPDATE: My happiness with this product is now being called into question. See this. Yeah, you know. White headphones and all.iPod? No, no. A Creative Zen Nano Plus. Which, if I'm not mistaken was announced at least five months before the iPod of the same name was. So who's biting whom on the branding? Huh? (As a quick aside, speaking of branding, I guess Creative is dropping the Nomad name. Zen = good name. Nomad = bad name. Weighing in at only one word longer than the name of any iPod I can think of, aside from the U2 one, the full name of this device still feels a bit wordy, if you count the "Plus.") So sometime in the last few weeks or months, I decided that while my two-year old Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra (what was I saying about naming?) makes it really nice and trivial to carry around my entire MP3 collection, it's not exactly easy to get new music on there. And definitely sucks for listening to Podcasts, which is my main interest with a new player. This is mainly due to it needing special software for connecting, whether in Windows or Linux, etc. etc. And when connecting to Gnomad in Linux, it takes a good few minutes to get its library read and ready to transfer files. A few minutes of hard drive spinning at full speed = big battery drain, and a few minutes wait in general = no fun at all. This isn't a big minus in general, but not great for dropping new files onto the unit a few times a week. So I decided that I need a flash-based player.  From time to time I would halfheartedly look through the various models available and kind of file the project off in the back of my mind as a "someday" thing, not finding anything that was particularly striking to me. But yesterday afternoon I decided to have a look through Best Buy's flash-based player section and see what I could, y'know, see. I found the Zen Nano Plus, which was on the lower end of the price scale at $109, and looked a little further into it. Based mostly on the weight of this glowing review, and a few opinions on Amazon, I made up my mind. (Bloggers not influential, wha'? Huge opportunity for crooked marketers, huh? :) Basically what I was looking for, that it has:- USB Mass Storage protocol (read: shows up with a drive letter in Windows)
- A friggin' screen, thanks
- A battery I can bloody remove
- Organization by directories, so syncing with
rsync or something shouldn't be a problem
And what would have been nice:- A smattering of supported formats, or at least more than MP3/WMA. (Not such a big deal for this device, though my next big-hard-drive-based music box will need to support every format under the sun, and thus probably won't be another Creative)
- An integrated USB plug so I could leave the cord at home would be nice, but isn't a requirement. (I actually falsely assumed this was the case, based on some earlier Creative players I had seen, but I was mistaken.)
- Integrated cigarette lighter, because it's definitely the right shape. :)
- Headphones not looking pretty much exactly like iPod 'phones. (The ones that came with my Zen Xtra two years ago were sort of moving toward the iPod style, but these are frighteningly similar. This disappoints me. I won't use them. I don't need white cords to be cool.)
- UI a little less clumsy, but I suppose there's a price to miniaturization. Oh, and I'm sure I'll be alright after a few days with it.
Niceties I wasn't looking for:- FM receiver, so I guess I can listen to NPR or the great DJ Pulse on my way home from work (and record radio as well!)
- Line-in recording (includes cable)
- Voice memo recording w/ integrated mic
- Takes AAA batteries (available everywhere, convenient to carry an extra, doesn't cost $50 a pop, etc.)
Other considerations/observations:- Getting the package open made me wish the knife would slip and put me out of my misery. Can we lose the white buds and take a lesson from Apple on this one?
- playsforsure logo stamped all over the packaging makes me feel like kind of a tool.
- Manual (shut up, I was bored) actually contains following bizarre warning: WARNING: The cord(s) included with this product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling. What. The. Fuck. Creative.?
So I'm pretty much sick of writing about this thing. Which is not to say there's anything wrong with it, but reviewing stuff usually leaves me pretty drained and I can't see any reason to go on. Now I'll take your questions. The short: only had it for 18 hours, but it's recommended so far.
| Does it have a SUPER long battery life? It does, after all, have to last for your entire commute ;-) |
|  Does it have a SUPER long battery life? It does, after all, have to last for your entire commute ;-)  18 hours on a single AAA, fool! |
| everdred wrote on Apr 3, '06, edited on Apr 3, '06 18 hours on a single AAA, fool! Wait, wait, I've got this one for you, Peter.
Yeah, that's about a day-and-a-half's commute. =) |
| Wait, wait, I've got this one for you, Peter. Actually I was going to ask how many batteries per week you'll need, but you seem to have beaten me to the same joke! |
| A smattering of supported formats, or at least more than MP3/WMA. While it may not be important to you, I'll add that the Creative mp3 players all work with the unlimited download monthly subscription music services. I have a Creative Zen Micro and I love being able to download and listen to new albums as I read reviews of them. I believe Dave is looking to get rid of his technically inferior ipod :) to take advantage of these new services. |
 | So how is your Creative Nano working out now (just discovered this post today)?
I recently shopped, and shopped for portable music devices the past couple of weeks for my wife. I ended up purchasing her iPod's 1GB Nano. It's taking a little getting used to, but seems to be pretty solid.
Outside of the cigarette lighter feature, I was basically wanting the same requirements of a device that you were. At the last minute someone in my Multiply network talked me out of getting a flash based drive (which I was completely high on). They told me that flash drives have a finite number of times that they can be written to unlike disk drive based media players. Hmmm, like I sucker I fell for that logic, despite owning a flash based drive myself for nearly 3 years now (Muvo Nomad 128MB).
Maybe by Christmas I can trick talk my wife into getting me another MP3 player, something with more space and a display screen. I primarily use my Nomad to listen to podcasts as well, and get bent when my commute last longer than the storage room on my Nomad....oh well, such is life.
Have any podcasts you'd recommend? |
| I'm pretty happy with it. So far, I've noticed one issue with the player sometimes shutting off while I skip through a track using cue/review. My guess is that the power this requires is too much for my battery to handle. (By the way, this only started happening when I started using cheap, albeit alkaline, batteries so I don't think it's a problem with the player. It was fine when I used the Duracell it came with.) Not being able to see the total track time is kind of an annoyance when listening to podcasts, and there not being any way to view ID3 tag info aside from track title is a little annoying too, but it's not a dealbreaker for me. Flash memory wears out, but so do hard drives. (And for a limited-storage unit that's meant to be carried around and perhaps dropped I'd rather have flash over an HD.) My Nano is formatted as FAT16, so perhaps you can use standard drive tools on it to mark bad sectors as such... I don't know. I actually wanted something Muvo-like... that's the one where the unit plugs directly into the USB port, no? I actually got my Nano out of the package and tried to pull it apart and was a little stumped when I noticed that it came with a USB cable. Podcasts... I'm not sure what kind of stuff you're into, but I regularly listen to: Media On the MediaOpen SourceMediaGeekMusic Cactus Killer RadioFake ScienceHellthyEtc. Theory of EverythingAmerican CopywriterIT Conversations (I pick and choose from this one.) LugRadioYeah, that's most of it. I don't have quite the long commute I used to; I've been struggling to keep up but I'm mostly managing. |
| I actually wanted something Muvo-like... that's the one where the unit plugs directly into the USB port, no? Yah, it comes apart from the battery housing and plugs directly into the USB port like a jump drive. In addition to the lack of a display screen, I don't like the fact that I don't have some kind of track counter. It especially is a problem when listening to a 30 to 40 minute podcast, having to stop the podcast at the 18 minute mark, then sometime later in the day returning and having to fast-forward guess to where you left off. Plus I swear the fast forward function moves maybe a half second faster then real-time, so I'm waiting forever to reach my mark. I hadn't tried any of the podcasts you listed, cool, some new things to listen to. I've been listening to: Lost: The Official Podcastabc.go.com/primetime/lost/podcastsa podcast put out by the writers of the greatest TV show on the air (heh-heh) P.O.V. with David W. Torrencejoelcrowservo.podomatic.coma friend of mine (and former radio dj) that lives locally and rants about whatever is on his mind at the moment Addicted to Racewww.addictedtorace.comtwo women that own their own diversity training business in new york city; talk about race, with a specific emphasis on mixed race identity and interracial relationships Cut & Paste Radiobulldada.podomatic.coma guy that re-mixes music along with current news, think videos for the radio...pretty interesting at times Then I listen sporadically to various other podcasts such as ESPN Radio, They Might Be Giants, NPR: Most E-mailed Stories, NPR: Story of the Day, and NPR: Technology. |
 | They told me that flash drives have a finite number of times that they can be written to unlike disk drive based media players. It's been probably a decade or so since rewrite limitations on EEPROM (aka "flash") memories were an issue.
But do you know what the limitations on writing are? Know how many times? Really. Take a guess. I'll wait ....
(pause)
100,000 times. That means you can over-write your song catalog 100,000 times. Not 10 times, not 100 times, but once every day for the next, oh, bazillion years.
That's before the first error happens. Then, if properly designed, your device
should be able to map out the bad location and carry on merrily for a spell. Further, there are no published limits on the number of times a flash memory can be read.
Now, how about the itty-bitty disk drives in MP3 players? (By the way, the newest ones are INSANELY small!) Ignoring the fact that a drop from hand-held height onto a hard surface while playing has a good chance of causing head crash, these drives can only start/stop 300,000 times. That's much more of a concern as it's likely that a drive will go through at least one start/stop cycle with every song that's played (the drives read ahead and then turn off to save power while the song plays).
In sum, spinning media has read limitations, flash media has write limitations. Since MP3 players spend most of their operational lives doing reads and players without any moving parts are potentially far more robust, I'd take a flash based one any day.
|
 | Well I got one of these and it started shutting itself off (using the battery it came with) until eventually it would come on at all...all in less than 3 days...We took it back and exchanged it for another one just like it and its been working perfectly now for 6 months...
P.S. PEOPLE, BE SMART...GET RECHARGABLE BATTERIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They are not at all expensive and it keeps you from having to buy new batteries all the time...also a package of about 4 batteries and a charger aren't alot of money...and if you keep batteries always charged...then you can swap them out when they get low or go dead. |
| everdred wrote on Apr 30, '07, edited on Apr 30, '07 P.S. PEOPLE, BE SMART...GET RECHARGABLE BATTERIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm sorry I didn't respond to your comment any earlier. I vaguely recall seeing it a while back, but I don't know why I didn't think to respond. :)
I spent my first year with the device using cheap alkalines. $8 at Best Buy bought me a pack of 12 or so off-brand AAAs and they served me well. During the course of the year, I had bought a battery charger ('cuz my Wii eats AAs for breakfast) so I figured I'd go with some rechargeables for the Nano this time around.
It makes me feel all environmentally warm and fuzzy and stuff, but they're certainly less convenient than my alkalines. I initially charged up two of my four-pack, put one in the device and kept the second closeby as a backup. The first one had an adequate lifespan (though the battery meter did seem to take a quicker initial hit than I'm used to), but the second, that I'd been carrying around for a couple weeks, post-charge, only started off around 2/3 battery bars, which is about what I've come to expect from the AAs I keep charged up for my Wii controllers.
I want the best of both worlds -- a source of rechargeable, just-in-time power... that start off as full. Does such a thing exist? |
| The battery meters can be misleading, as the chemistry is different between alkaline and NiCd or NiMH batteries. What does that mean? The voltage generated by a single cell of a 1.5V alkaline battery is closer to 1.7V, and as the battery discharges, it goes through a lazy decay through a plateau at about 1.5V, and then droops pretty quickly past 1.4V, plummeting down to 1.1V (if I recall, the defined end-of-life for alkaline chemistry).
A NiCd (a/k/a nicad) or NiMH battery's chemistry is different, and the nominal voltage is 1.2 V instead of 1.5V. If a device, like a music player, is using voltage as an indication of remaining energy in a battery, and the scale is set for alkaline batteries, a nicad or NiMH battery will never show full scale, despite being fully charged.
While this is rather disconcerting, the real test is actual lifespan. And here, things get even messier. Currently, the highest capacity batteries generally available are NiMH chemistry. But to achieve such huge capacities, some compromises had to be made, and an effect called self-discharge was one of them. Self-discharge is what determines shelf life: an alkaline battery has relatively low self-discharge so loses little charge when sitting unused on a shelf. A modern high-capacity NiMH has a relatively high self-discharge rate so that after a full discharge cycle, it droops to nothing after about a month.
So, if you test your device with both kinds of batteries in continuous use, you'll probably see that the NiMH batteries are better. If you test your device by using it for a few minutes every day, the alkaline batteries will probably be better. And this is not based on the displayed number of bars, but how long it takes until the device no longer operates.
So, what's a consumer to do? Buy good NiMH batteries, and almost as importantly, buy a good charger. The 1-hour-zap-them-with-amps-of-current variety that are very inexpensive are not the right thing. The chargers made by MAHA are quite good, but much more expensive, and take longer to charge your batteries. Your batteries will take more charge and last longer, though.
There has been some effort to develop a different chemistry, lithium based, if I recall, that more closely mimics the voltage curves of the alkaline process, but I've not seen them widely available yet. |
| Oh, and store your unused batteries in the rerigerator. Even the expensive lithium-polymer batteries used in most laptops lose capacity -- not charge but total available capacity -- just by getting old. Although reports vary, expect rechargeable batteries to last only 2-3 years before they can't take much of a charge anymore. Keeping them cold helps slow down these degredation processes. |
| |
