Creative ZEN X-Fi review

The ZEN X-Fi is a portable media player that can not only store your music, photos and videos in its 16GB of memory, but also stream media directly from your PC via your home WiFi network, so you can hook it up to your hi-fi or TV and play what you want anywhere in the house.

Sound interesting? We thought so, but some fundamental flaws spoil the experience.

If you've built up a library of media files on your PC, it makes sense to use a portable device to access it more flexibly. As well as streaming media in real time, which also avoids filling up the player's memory with huge video tracks just to watch them once, you can use the WiFi connectivity (a cheaper 8GB model does without this) to download files to the X-Fi for later playback without having to plug it into your PC.

To do this successfully, you'd need a simple menu interface that would let you to zoom through your files quickly and easily. The Zen X-Fi doesn't quite manage that. In fact, with a total of 13 tiny buttons, it's about as far removed from intuitive as you can get. Add to this a slow and clunky menu system, and the concept rapidly loses its appeal.

If you have the patience to navigate to your favourite music track, it's worth the wait. The Creative's sound quality was among the best we've heard on any MP3 player, with rich, deep bass and sparkling treble, partly thanks to the excellent noise isolating earphones that come included. Video playback wasn't quite as thrilling. We could have lived with the Zen's modest 2.5 inch screen, with an even more modest 320x240 pixel resolution, if we'd been able to drag and drop standard MPEG4 video files onto the device - but no. We had to use the supplied software to transcode our videos first, adding time and hassle to the process.

Configuring the wireless connection also proved problematic, hindered by Creative's software wrongly diagnosing what was amiss on our PC. Once set up, download speeds and audio quality were pleasing, although the battery ran down alarmingly quickly when using WiFi.

Properly implemented, this could have been a great player, but it just doesn't have the X factor.

Author: Andy Zarkesh