By Mike KobrinPrice = $249.99 direct
With Creative Zen MicroPhoto improves upon the original with its slightly larger 1.5-inch color OLED screen and a beefier 8GB hard drive and few other minor enhancements. It is still the same MP3 player we all know
This Creative Zen is identical to its monochrome predecessor, though now the front face of the MicroPhoto is textured and protrudes slightly from the white plastic back. All this does is make using the touch strip (a perpetual annoyance for many users) a bit more of a tactile experience. Unfortunately, the rest of the buttons surrounding the strip are also touch sensitive, so it's easy to miscalculate and wind up in the wrong spot in the menu system.
The little bumps in between buttons don't help much either; we'd prefer if the bumps were on the buttons instead of between them.
But at least you can navigate in the dark, thanks to the signature glowing blue outline and backlit buttons. Measurements are still a compact 2 by 3.3 by 0.7 inches and 3.8 ounces, with Creative apparently resisting Apple's continual challenge to make things smaller.
The Zen MicroPhoto syncs with Windows-based PCs via Windows Media Player, though you can also use the included Creative MediaSource software (required for syncing with Microsoft Outlook).
The device is PlaysForSure-compatible, so you can load it up with protected WMAs from various online music download and subscription services, as well as MP3 unprotected WMA and WAV files.
Unfortunately, the player still doesn't support lossless compression formats or gapless playback. As of this writing, it also does not support content from Audible.com, but that should be coming soon, since most of Creative's other players work with that service. You can also partition off part of the 8GB hard drive as a USB mass storage class–compatible drive for use with Macs and PCs (for data storage), though you can't load music this way.
The interface is also identical to the original Zen Micro, with the obvious exceptions of color screen and customizable wallpaper. Overall, we found the interface responsive, though we did experience a few temporary lockups when using the track skip buttons, and we often saw a "Please wait…" message when moving around in the menu system. We like the configurable main menu and the contextual menus, though we wish you could configure the contextual menus as well.
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