Creative Zen Stone Plus 2 GB MP3 Player with Built-in Speaker and Clip (Black)

by Creative Labs

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches ; 4.8 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0012YK92M
• Item model number: 70PF233009111
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Powered with a built-in speaker, now you can share your music out loud at the touch of a button. The perfect companion to avid sportsmen, the player captures personal bests with its stopwatch function, while letting you run to the invigorating beat of the music. Champaign Color.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting speaker, April 25, 2008

By 

Music lover (OK USA) - See all my reviews

I must say I am very happy with this little gadget with speaker. Initially, I don't hold much expectation with the built-in speaker. However, I immediately start to enjoy wearing it with the clip and letting the music spreading around. It brings music to the people nearby and we all enjoy it. It certainly breaks the psychological barrier and isolation usually created by wearing a earphone. The sound quality certainly is not the point when the speaker is used. On the other hand, you can always wear a earphone when you want to be alone. The music coming out of earphone is about as good as my other players.

Pros:
* Transparent file transfer (work as a USB mass storage device, big plus).
* Very light to wear and the clip is definite a plus.
* Speaker is much more useful than I thought.
* Quick charging
* Blue LED display looks nice and pretty visible in room light condition (not under the sun though)

Cons:
* The pearl color one looks a little cheap, but the elastic cover help some.
* The user interface is much inferior comparing to my previous Cowon's G3. For example,
-the menu will not circularly loop around. When you reach one end, you have to go back all the way to reach the 1st item.
- Files are not browsable. You can only select the folders that hold music files.
- No bookmark, no adjustable scanning speed, minimized info display.
- Could be more innovative with its speaker (adding MP3 alarm function will be one.)

However, with the surprising fun factor added by the speaker and with such affordable cost I still recommended it. Some reviewer mentioned "very" slow response in the web, but I don't feel it at all.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Defective product and very defective customer service, July 24, 2008

By 

Benjamin J. Schwartz - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Creative Zen Stone Plus 2 GB MP3 Player with Built-in Speaker and Clip (Black) (Electronics)

This review is for the Creative Zen Stone Plus 2GB with speaker mp3 player. I was originally going to give this product 4 of 5 stars (see below), but after the experience I just finished, even one star is too high. I bought my player 2 months ago, used it for about 3 weeks and was generally happy (with a few annoyances; see below), when all of sudden the player simply died while I was using it. Since the player was under warranty, I called Creative, and after being cut-off several times and having several frustrating conversations with "technical specialists", Creative agreed that my player was dead and that I should ship it back and get a replacement. So, I packed up my dead player, paid UPS about $6 to ship it back, and waited for my replacement. The replacement came in a few days, but what Creative sent me was a pair of wireless headphones, not a new mp3 player. So, I called Creative again, explained that they had sent me the wrong item, and requested that they send a new mp3 player and give me a shipping label to return their headphones to them. Now more than a month later, the new player still has not arrived, and Creative still has not sent me a shipping label to return the headphones. Creative claims that they cannot ship the new player until I return the headphones (even though my dead player arrived at their factory over a month ago), but they have not provided any means for me to return the headphones (and there's no way I'm going to pay to ship them back!). I have called them every day for the past 2 weeks, and no one can tell me why my shipping label hasn't appeared or why I can't get my replacement player in advance of shipping back the headphones that I never asked for. So, I spent $60 on an mp3 player, got to use it for a few weeks, and a month later, I still have nothing to show for it, not even a dead player to use as a paperweight.

My original review was going to give this player 4 of 5 stars. I selected this model over the Sansa Clip and a few others for the following reasons: 1) Mac OS compatible out of the box (mostly -- all the firmware upgrades must be done on a PC, but the player was recognized instantly by iTunes on my Mac the first time I plugged it in); it also can be used as a USB memory drive for non-music files. 2) support for .m4a files, which I have a lot of and which the Sansa won't play. 3) Stopwatch and FM tuner, which I thought would be great while I was out running.

My take on the product for the 3 weeks it worked: 1) The player worked fine. The sound was excellent (once I replaced the cheap earbuds it came with); volume was more than adequate; 5-band equalizer + bass boost worked well; navigating the menus was a bit clunky, requiring multiple button presses of different durations, but I got used to it after a few days of fiddling. 2) Music organization on the player was strange; there was no way to navigate by album, artist or composer -- only by song name. Songs can be grouped into folders and navigation done one folder at a time, but this must be done by hand (both while navigating and placing the music on the device). One nice touch was that songs could be deleted directly from the player without having to connect to the computer. 3) The FM radio worked poorly; reception even on strong stations was staticky, and weak stations didn't come in at all. 4) The display remained on in stopwatch mode, which drained the battery quickly. I found I got 15-16 hours of playback time w/o the stopwatch, and only about 10 hours with the stopwatch. The display brightness needed to be set to max to read it outdoors, even on an only moderately sunny day. 5) I never tried to use the voice recorder, so I can't comment on its effectiveness.

Summary: The Stone Plus player isn't bad if you can get one that works, but Creative's customer service is so poor that it's not worth the risk!

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Please make an MP3 player for my dad, September 25, 2008

By 

zemes - See all my reviews

This review is from: Creative Zen Stone Plus 2 GB MP3 Player with Built-in Speaker and Clip (Black) (Electronics)

This little thing does so many things, it is incredible. But does it give you a good user experience? It depends. I can imagine a teen who has nimble fingers maneuvering over those little buttons and constantly changing menus, but I bought it for my dad who would like to listen to some recorded educational materials and to record certain lectures and messages. I searched all over to analyze the features and made sure this one does everything he needs, and some.

Well, I realized this isn't what my dad needs the moment I opened the box, and was certain about it within several minutes of using it. He will be frustrated beyond imagination by the constantly changing menu and tiny teeny buttons. In addition to the fact that everything is so small, the navigation menu is extremely confusing, not because of its poor logic or lack of logic, but because of the choice of multifunction multipurpose buttons that are made necessary because of the small size. You can never predict what the button does because not only does it depend on the context (meaning that what the button does depends on where you are at in the navigation system), it also depends on how long you hold it. Using this is almost like playing a game which requires your mind to be engaged with an enemy and predict your enemy's next move. And you enemy intends to defeat you, not to play with you. I got pretty good at that because I am used to this type of navigation and my mind intuitively follows the logic behind it. But not for anyone who is used to equipment on which a button does what its label says it does and nothing else.

Besides, the thing does not give you time to think. Whenever you hesitate just a little bit (say about 5 seconds of inaction), the screen goes off, and that changes the context of menu again. If during those 5 seconds you have been thinking hard what to do, whatever you have figured out has become invalid by this time. It is so fussy, using the thing is like having a conversation with somebody who is extremely impatient. And you can't change the behavior of the screen display. This is not the same as auto power-off feature, which you can adjust within the settings among multiple settings ranging from one minute to 15 minutes. The screen off is a fixed feature. It goes off in about 5-6 seconds (definitely less than 10 seconds) if you have not pushed a button. This is absolutely crazy. I can see the point of saving battery, but given how tiny the screen is, and with my fairly advanced knowledge of electronics, I'm pretty sure that increasing the screen-off time from the current less than 10 seconds to five minutes isn't going to cut the battery time by half. I would rather have something that needs to be charged twice as frequently but with a screen that can stay on for much longer and doesn't drive me crazy.

Manufacturers, listen, not everyone who may benefit from a modern digital audio player/recorder is a teenager or a gamer. Grow up please, at least design one product (among the hundreds) for someone like my dad.

I apologize for voicing such complaints that may seem strange to many of you who are used to this type of product designs. Also, I would be remiss if I don't balance my review by acknowledging its capabilities. If you don't mind its fussy "personality" of this little guy, he can be your very good friend because he can do many things, and does them very well. For example, one of the things that impressed me a lot is its ability to retain the playing location at the time you turn it off. It resumes from where you stopped it last time very reliably. I tried a variety of combinations of what you could do, but the MP3 player in this little gadget never failed to remember it's last position. This may sound strange to you, but this was one of the major frustrations I had with previous generations of MP3 players that were only suitable for listening to short music, but not anything longer like a lecture, a message or an audio book. In addition, despite its tiny size, the speaker is surprisingly loud. And the microphone and recorder aren't a gimmick. They aren't your high-quality audio recorder, but if you ever need to recod a live conversation or message, it does a quite decent job and will give you a clear recording as long as the speaker isn't too far away.