Customer Reviews

Creative Zen Nano 512 MB MP3 Player (Black)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This one is the Nano model. The product description is inaccurate. It does not come with FM receiver, belt clip/protective case, or armband. The Nano Plus which is approx $35 more does come with these features. I was very disappointed after receiving my shipment, but Amazon was able to work with me to resolve my issue.

Other than that, I just started using it and it is very easy to load songs, and the sound quality is great. Not sure why so many people complain about the ear buds. The materials used do seem a little cheap. Scrolling thru the menus and options seems realtively easy considering there is limited space to put buttons.

Overall, good product if you do not need an FM radio, belt clip, or armband. Otherwise, there may be better options for you.

I love this player for the incredible list of features for the price. The line recording is great, the interface is good, radio with recording is a great plus, the built-in mike is a nice touch, and everything fits into a tiny little plastic case the size of a package of trident gum. The features are all well thought out, although the mic is very quiet and really could not be used to record something like a lecture. I would love to try hooking up a nice mic and small preamp through the line in, as I'm sure it would sound much, much better. You can record in 128 or 160 kbps mp3 through this input. The 160 kbps sounds great. The computer software is decent. The reason I gave this unit a 3 instead of a 4 or 5 is because they obviously skimped on materials to keep the cost down. The plastic looks great, but it scratches incredibly easily (I think I would recommend getting white instead of black for this reason), the button, which look like they should be made of metal, are unsubstantial silver-painted plastic, and the battery cover appears very prone to breakage. I expected real metal buttons (like a cell phone) and a more substantial plastic casing, or even metal casing (I would be willing to pay an extra $10-$20 for these better materials -- I mean, it wouldn't require much seeing how small the thing is!) The plastic scrolling wheel is a bit hard to move side-to-side at times. I use the included rubbery belt-clip case-thing all the time to protect the unit. It makes it feel more substantial and protects from any big scratches. The headphones are made of much better quality material, fit nicely in the ears, and sound pretty good, but they buzz whenever the backlight on the unit comes on, and they also crackle a little between songs. I generally leave the backlight off to save battery, anyway. Again, this does not happen with most other headphones when plugged into the unit. So, if you can live with these physical design flaws, this MP3 player rules. If it's going to bother you (Like it does with me), probably go elsewhere.

I bought a new Zen Nano a few months ago. I mostly use it to listen to while walking around the campus. The ear buds that came with it are horrible to use, in my opinion. They fit very poorly and the audio seems to switch sides sometimes...but most people will tell you that no matter what you buy, the included headphones are never that good. I immediately bought a $20 pair of headphones, and then I was fairly happy. Although I am still planning on buying even better headphones later, maybe some Seinnheiser HD202's which I bet would sound great with this player.

Anyways, after a while you get used to using the controls and pushing the buttons with one hand, which is nice. The black case does get noticeably scratched up over time, it did come with a little plastic "sleeve" but it's an ugly looking semi-transparent white rubber thing. It makes me think of a condom for my player, so I never used it. If you don't mind it getting scratched up, then I say, forget using the weird included holder.

These past few weeks I've noticed that my player has been taking longer to turn off, which is done by holding down the play button. The past few days, it won't actually turn off at all. I have to open the battery cover and pull the battery out to turn it off, which is a little inconvenient. I haven't read about this happening to anyone else, so I just might be unlucky.

I would say that for the price, it's a really nice player, (...) I do wish I had saved up a little more and purchased the 1 gig one though, since I like to have a lot of musical choices to pick from. This model can hold about 6 or so albums at about 192kbps, which is CD quality audio.

I love my Creative Nano it has a wonderful list of features for its small size. I like to pick on my friends who have iPods and tell them that I also have Radio, a voice recorder and mp3 encoder and I paid less than they did.

I was tempted to give it 5 stars, but I think the casing is a bit to delicate for standard use, the black cover scratched very easily and there isn't much you can do to remove the scratches. Also the batter cover broke after one month of usage. The good thing is that I called Creative support to see if they had replacements and they offered to replace the whole unit.

I haven't seen the new iPod, bur I think that with the Creative Nano you get your moneys worth.

Save your money. I bought this for my husband for Christmas and it quit working 3 weeks later. First it started turning off for no reason, we changed the batteries, no better. Now it won't turn on and stay on for longer than 2 seconds. What a piece of crap!!!!!!!! Zero stars.

I got this for christmas and It's my best christmas present I have. It's very nice, looks nice, and plays nice. Down Below I have written a Pros and Cons list that I hope will help.

Pros:

- Battery Life Is Great

- You can record random things onto the Mp3 from the microphone

- The volume is very loud and very low ( in other words, good range of volume)

- There is a thing called "EQ" Which makes you choose the way it sounds or you can make your own way

- The backlight is great

- The Mp3 comes with a cord to transferre the songs

- Only four buttons

- Very fast to download a CD of songs (about 5 minutes)

- Has 16 different functions to personalize it any way you want

- On, Off, Play, Pause is all one button (that's a plus)

- Smaller than an ipod (I think's thats obvious though)

- Size of half my finger and I have about a 1 and a 1/2 inch finger

- You can learn how to use the whole thing in about 40 minutes if your really interested in it

- It tells what version it is, how many MB (Mega Bites) you have on it, how many you have left, and how many songs you have on there

- The songs are alphbitized and so aren't the albums, so if you want to switch to an album that start with an N and your at one that starts with a D or something.

Cons:

- My Battery Casing has already broken and is being held with tape for the time being until I call the company

- The Mp3 will get scratched easily

All in all, the only reason I gave it a 4 is because the construction of it is cruddy (just the platic, not the chips or wires or anything). It took about 3 minutes to install. The only things I recomend is it does get tiring to manually type in the information on the Mp3 so you should register for some thing that will atuomatically put the information on for you. I hoped this helped and sorry for any typo's!

I bought this player as a Christmas gift for my 13 year old. She loves music, but she was tired of lugging around her CD player & CD collection anytime we took a trip.

Only one disappointment: At the time Amazon had the wrong features listed in the description, so I thought it had line-in recording capabilities... it doesn't.

If you just need a good basic mp3 player you can't go wrong with this one. It has survived quite a few drops and a good bit of banging around, as it belongs to a young kid. We have had NO PROBLEMS of any type with this player that sees daily use. It is easy to load/manage songs on this player as well. The provided software is easy to use and install. We have loaded music from Napster, music match, and personal CDs with out a hitch. Battery life is as good or better than promised. Creative builds a good product that bridges the gap between the cheap-junk players and the Almighty Ipod. 512k is enough memory for quite a few songs, but some may opt for a bigger capacity. Like I said before, if you want a quality, easy to use player at a fair price this may be the one.

pro

1. easy to use

2. support lots of languages

3. light and handy

con

1. need to get a better headphone for better sound

2. need to get closer for recording

I received my Zen Nano as a Christmas gift, and I already love it. The system is extremely easy to work with; I never even had to look at the User Manual to figure out how to build playlists and move songs around on my player. I saw another review that refers to manually typing the information into the player. If you are using Windows Media, you won't have to do that; the only information I've had to type are the names of my playlists. Windows Media recognizes and lists the song titles, and the info syncs right to the player. My only complaint with this player is that it is it didn't come with an armband; Creative makes one, but they are currently out of stock (hopefully only for another week). There is a neckcord that works okay, but I use the player when weightlifting and it can get in the way. That's a small price to pay for a terrific player, though, and you can't beat the value. Some people note that they would buy the 1Gb player if they had it to over, but I don't mind the 512Mb - I get sick of the playlists anyway, and changing the mix is part of the fun. Overall, a highly recommended product.

If you want an mp3 player for exercise, this is a good player. For exercise, flash memory is definitely the way to go. Unless you are fairly stationary on an exercise bike or other equipment, I've found that even anti-skip hard drive players tend to bounce around when I'm running or exercising. The buttons on the Zen Nano are a bit small, but the small size is also an advantage, because I can easily slip the player into a pocket--no need for armbands like with other players. It is easy to use and has excellent sound quality.