Hi there,
Well the funniest thing happened to me today, just got up as you do on your day off, to the sound of the door bell ringing. Low and behold a delivery man was dropping a package off, being half asleep I signed for the thing left it in the hall and dosed back to bed for another hour or so. I shot up out of bed a little later thinking what the hell did I just sign for, go to the package and it's a Creative Zen 2.0, that I ordered about two months ago, completely gave up on ever arriving and already had the money refunded on my card ! Of course I will be notifying the company that sent it to me, in the same good time that they dispatched the order and sent me the jukebox ;)

So now I'm lumped with a 30gb IPod and a 20Gb Zen, so I thought why not compare the two together. I would go on a nomad site and post it, but I'm more familiar with this one, so I'll just drop it in here.

First thing in comparing the two devices was the different sizes, the zen is notieably bigger than the ipod, quite disturbingly so, well to the point that one would fit comfortably in your pocket and the other would have the old 'is that a hdd based mp3 player in your pocket or are you just happy to see me' popping out of everyone's mouth. The second thing I quite rapidly got to grips with was how messy the menu system was. There is a slight delay from pressing buttons to the actual player instigating some form of action. This is the exact reason I have always bought Nokia phones over other makes, more instantaneous response from keypresses. However the way they have implemented the EAX (Equaliser) settings is a hell of a lot more advanced, and in my humble opinion sounds a #### site better, I must stress, I'm not talking about overall sound quality, just the quality of the built in DSP that the Zen has. I mean you set garage, or bathroom, or concert hall, and by god it actually sounds like you're really there. Then again, I guess Creative's business has always been sound cards, so no real surprise there.

In stark contrast however Apple's menu system is one of the best I've ever used on a portable MP3 player, barring possibly my first player a Samsung Yepp which was about as intuitive as the Apples'. The shortcoming of the IPod in this area is quite obviously the equaliser setting, for people who like the normal sound of music, then there's no real issue for you, but if you're like me and you actually want to customise where you do the gains and in which frequencies, only the zen has this feature, new firmware please apple !

I'm sat here right now listening to the Zen and one of my DJ mixes recored direct from a DAB tuner at 192Kb MP3 Stero, and even using the standard headphones it's pretty impressive, with my crappy Seinheisers (HD210) it sounds nearly excellent, well something I could never distinguish from listening on a portable sony cd player with the same headphones. Having said that there isn't a lot in it to differentiate between the Pod and the Zen on this one. I will say though to my humble ears, that the zen does sound better, overall, for Dance music, and for some Rock and Indie music, I haven't listened to much else yet :) However I will say one annoying thing about the zen, especially when I love listening to my live dance sets (over 7Gb of my collection is dance sets) is the fact that Apple has such a vastly superior scan/fast forward system to get to the exact point in the set you want, the zen does have bookmarks, but sometimes I just want to zoom to a certain point in the song, and the only way of doing this on a zen is holding the fast forward button and the scan speed slowly increases, if you're not careful it'll zip to the end of the track before you've even noticed it's sped up, which is rather disconcerting. With the apple you just hit the middle select button to change the status bar to the diamond thingie ;) and then scroll using the circle to the point in the song. I love this feature and wouldn't change it for the world.

Right battery life, a mute point for most of us, and unfortunately the zen is in a league of it's own here. I haven't even fully charged the zen's battery, it's status is pretty much full, I've been hammering all the menu options over and over again, skipping tracks like there's no tomorrow, full volume with every possible DSP effect I can throw at it, getting onto 4hrs now and the battery hasn't even gone off full yet. So thats really pleasing. In stark contrast, an hour's heavy playing in the menu system of the Pod will have the batter dropping down to 3, further scanning of songs, and heaven forbid I smack the bass boost on, and the battery will be on 1 before I even have a chance to think why the hell I didn't bring the charger out with me. I KNOW people say if you leave it on a long playlist, don't change the track, no backlight, no equaliser, blahblahblah, it probably would reach 8hrs, BUT if I can hammer the zen for 4hrs solid and have the hard drive spinning up every few seconds and it still hasn't left full charge, apple are doing something wrong, yet again, firmware update please ! Before anyone says anything about my less than professional battery life tests, I know ! But hey, it's just me going by what I see, nothing more, nothing less :D

Ok onto PC Interface, I use USB2.0 to link the zen, and firewire to link the ipod, there's no point in even talking about the transfer speeds of either, they're both blisteringly fast, and to be honest I can't tell the difference between them. I have a collection of about 18GB and both did it in roughly 10-15mins which in itself is gobsmacking, so no real need for me to get into seconds difference. I will say the out of the box solution for the zen is better, PlayCenter is a lot more rounded software, they don't force you to register if you don't want to, it doesn't automatically change all your file associations. HOWEVER I will say that XPlay which is the software I use now with my IPod is vastly superior to PlayCenter. Don't Apple and Creative realise, if I had wanted some uber-software to play my pc music, transfer to the device, do the washing up, make my bed, I'd have gone out and bought something specifically like that, all I want is a simple utility to transfer from PC to device and maybe help me with Playlists, something XPlay does beautifully, something that MusicMatch and PlayCenter do NOT do well. I've heard ITunes is similar to Musicmatch but I won't comment as I don't know the software, yet again these are only my views, I'm sure there's hundreds of people out there that want the uber-software I just belittled, sorry if you are one of them.

Right to run down the final little things, the zen is boxed like any other pc product, cheap, cheerful and effective, it does the job, you know it's all there, brill. The pod is a different kettle of fish, I had goosebumps when my 30Gb got delivered and I started opening the box and the different compartments bit by bit. Something creative could learn from apple. Carrying cases for both devices are poor to say the least, leaving the avenue wide open for aftermarket suppliers. Having said that the creative has the slightly more robust case out of the two. Another annoying little issue is the zen is noticeable louder with it's hard drive than the ipod, yet again, not an issue when you're wearing big naff off headphones and pumping the volume out at full, but then again the classical buffs here might get slightly peeved by it, so I thought it was worth mentioning.

Ok so I've covered about everything. Right now I'm still sat here listening to the Zen with my Seinheisers on, and I must say I'm impressed, the battery still hasn't dropped a notch, and I'm playing with it like there's no tomorrow. My IPod is sat over in it's dock which has become it's new home considering the alarming rate at which it looses charge when I start playing with it. I find this a sad moment in my life and yet a remarkably happy one, because whilst writing this, I have made a startling conclusion about my own values in life. The creative is sat here with it's better battery life, better sound quality, easier to use PC interface straight out of the box, vastly superior DSP settings, and yet for some reason I know which player I'll be taking out and about with me tomorrow.

I'd love to put this down to the whole size issue, but at the end of the day, I guess I'm just more fashion concious than I thought I was. Most geek friends of mine would love the zen, but the other 95% of my friends would probably just laugh at me, so it's the IPod from now untill the end of time for me :) One last thing that might come off as freaky or not, hopefully not in an IPodder lounge. From the moment you take the zen out the box to the moment you've played with it right up untill it reaches a realistic 12hr battery life, not for one minute do you gain any attachment to it, you drop it, you forget about it, you're not going to loose any sleep over it. For the Ipod it's a completely different matter. From the minute the pod is out the box you feel like the product was designed soley for you, and in that moment you bond with it. Every marketing guru's dream. When you forget it, you get angry, when you drop it you get sad, when you loose it you cry. These are emotions for an inanimate object, and also something a zen could never induce from me.

I think to sum it up, I've chosen love over technology, that's kinda profound, init ? ;)