We love just how the latest Creative flash-based MP3 player looks. It may seem simple, but for iPod-weaned consumers, simplicity is just what they crave for. Top it off with Creative's usual expertise for making good basic MP3 players and the S200 is a worthy music mate for all your portable moves.

Design
The shiny blue exterior of our review unit feels as good as it looks. The matt coating gives the little S200 a classy feel and differentiates it from other MP3 players at its price range. Unlike previous Creative MuVos, the S200 has abandoned the legacy scroll wheel inherited from early generations of the Nomad Jukebox in favor of a quad-directional joystick to minimize the number of keys used.

In fact, physical keys run up to a total of only three: The joystick, a play and a record button. That's in keeping with Creative's new Zen design philosophy. But tactile feedback turned out to be mixed. Though the buttons felt solid when pressed, we could hear the buttons rattling when we gave the unit a slight shake.

We were also a little disappointed when we turned on the S200. The PLED (Polymer Light Emitting Diode) display was blinding; it's so small, it's enough to rob us of our eyesight. The bright orange display can be both charming and off-putting depending on how close you are to the retro crowd.

Navigation was surprisingly painless. One click of the joystick and the main menu showed up. Options were neatly categorized in a linear side-by-side manner which, given the limited number of options, was a neat way of keeping things simple when there's minimum display estate.

Back to form factor. The S200 was as light as a feather and probably just as flimsy. It felt plasticky all around and the battery compartment lid could be unyielding at times, to the point that it sometimes opened with a screech.

Features
The S200 packs a decent amount of features into its 68.5 x 36.8 x 14.5mm frame. There is FM radio, FM/voice recording and a basic set of preset equalizers. What delighted was that the S200 uses replaceable AAA alkaline batteries; a commodity that's easily available for any traveler without the compounding concerns of country voltage standards.

The S200 does not support ID3 tag browsing and it can be cumbersome if care is not taken in organizing the song collection by folders. The S200 allows for only one folder to be viewed at a time and this can be counter-intuitive when there's a large number of folders.

	Sing the mad karaoke song.

Software-wise, the S200 comes with some nifty, if not particularly useful, audio applications. One of these is SmartFill, which acts like the Autofill feature for the iPod shuffle. However, unlike the Apple version which allows for tagging based on popularity and playlist, the SmartFill has only an option for source folder selection.

Singapore Idol aspirants can take heart from the Creative Karaoke Player. The app mimicks the interface of an actual karaoke machine on the computer, complete with tonal control and voice suppression features. It's fun and a cheap alternative to get in on Idol-mania when you can't get pass the auditions.

Performance
Battery life on the S200 was decent enough. We garnered 19 hours 5 minutes using 240MB worth of MP3 files played on a continuous loop. This placed the S200 above the Sony NW-E005 which scored 16 hours 3 minutes.

File transfer speed for the S200 was very disappointing. It could maintain only a very sluggish 0.6MB per second and was the slowest among the MP3 players we had seen thus far this year.

The FM autoscan function worked pretty well; it captured all the radio stations in our test location save for one. We were impressed that even notoriously difficult-to-autoscan stations were picked up as well.

We did not see any significant advantages offered by the PLED display. It looked much like a monochrome LCD or OLED display. It should be noted that OLED and PLED technologies have similar display performances, though PLED is known to be cheaper to manufacture.