Creative Zen X-Fi2 (8GB)

By Kelvin Low, CNET Asia
Oct 7, 2009

"The MP3 war has started already and I am the one to declare war", said the CEO of the Singapore-based company, Sim Wong Hoo, back in 2004. In the past five years since, Creative's portable music players have managed to put a dent on the gigantic Apple market, but it's still far from emerging as the winner.

Still, that hasn't stopped Creative churning out great players like the Zen to go head-on with the iPods. Earlier this year, it launched the Zen MX and Mozaic EZ300. In July, we had a feel of its new Zii Egg, a brilliant touchscreen device that's half MP3 player, half miniature supercomputer.

We were caught by surprise when Creative announced the Zen X-Fi2 at IFA 2009, which was unlike the original Zen X-Fi which came with plenty of rumors prior to its launch. The new Zen X-Fi2 offers 8GB, 16GB and 32GB capacities, and is the first touchscreen player in the company's product lineup.

Design

Is imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? The Zen X-Fi2's design may look similar to the iPod touch, albeit in a smaller, more pocket-friendly 102 x 57 x 11.6mm.

The player is made entirely from plastic with a shiny metallic strip that surrounds the edges. The rear of the player gets a matte finish, while the front estate sports a glossy surface. The matte effect is great at resisting scratches, but the Zen X-Fi2's glossy finish attracts smudges and oil.

There are just three buttons on this player. On the top is a Power/Hold button, with a Home button on the front and a Reset button at the bottom. For connectivity, the Zen X-Fi2's microSD slot sits beside the Power/Hold button at the top of the unit. To the right is where we find the 3.5mm headphone/TV-output jack and a standard mini-USB type B port. Directly below the Home button is a small port for the speaker output.

The Zen X-Fi2 lacks a dedicated volume control, and adjusting the volume via touchscreen can be tricky.

Features

The glossy screen finish is reflective and causes glare. In bright environments, the panel was still readable, but when viewed directly from the front, the display quality was surprisingly good for a resistive touchscreen. Despite the lack of color capability, the screen was bright and the contrast just about right. It only washes-out when viewed from the sides.

The 3-inch WQVGA screen offers a 400 x 240-pixel resolution which appears to be sharp. However, the display is able to show only 262k colors, compared with the Zen's 16.7 million color screen. The Zen X-Fi2's display suffers from visible color banding when viewing some photographs as well as videos.


Navigation remains similar to its predecessor, although some minute changes were made to adapt this for a touchscreen interface. Browsing the music library after loading the player with songs is relatively simple as the device will group the albums into alphabetical order.


You'll have to select the alphabetical icon on the music browser to toggle between searching via names in alphabetical order and names grouped by the first letter. It got tedious only when we chose to browse by song level. Scrolling is average with some noticeable lag while flicking through the song or album list. The Zen X-Fi2 player doesn't offer folder browsing as an option. However, the ability to create a playlist on-the-go and delete files off the player without hooking it to a PC us a plus point.

We connected the player to a PC and it was recognized as a standard USB drive, which is good news for those who shuffle their music between Windows and OS X platforms. The USB connection also recharges the built-in battery, taking about 2.5 hours to fully charge.

Creative claims a 25-hour audio playback and 5 hours with video. In reality, we managed to squeeze out about 20 hours listening to songs and about 4.5 hours watching videos, including several occasions when we used the onboard speaker to playback tunes.

The audio format support includes MP3, WMA, WAV, Audible4, AAC and Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) which is a lossless codec that audiophiles like. As for the video formats support, this Creative can play WMV, MPEG4, DivX4/5 and XviD files at VGA (640 x 480-pixel) resolution.

The FM tuner features auto scanning, 32 station presets, and FM recording. There's a built-in microphone at the top of the player for making voice recordings, and the player accepts JPEG and BMP images as well. The nifty feature about the microSD slot is that the player is capable of backing up all data on the memory card onto the onboard storage.

Tags: Player, Zen X-Fi2, Design, Apple iPod, touch screen

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