Creative Labs Nomad review

The Nomad oozes quality.

It's ultra-slim, metallic appearance beats other MP3 players hands down, and the addition of a leather carry case is a nice touch. It has 64Mb of memory, providing enough storage space for around one hour of CD-quality music. One 32Mb memory bank is built in, the other supplied on a removable SmartMedia memory card. Songs can be downloaded from legitimate sources on the Internet or 'ripped' from CDs and converted to MP3 format, using the supplied Digital Audio Center software. A docking station is supplied for connecting the player to a PC's parallel port. It also doubles as a battery recharger. The Nomad also works as an FM radio, with excellent reception, and as a dictaphone.

Two main software utilities are supplied. The Digital Audio Center is used to create MP3 files, and compile them into databases on your PC's hard disk. It can also download the songs to the Nomad's memory. The Creative Nomad Manager is a simple file transfer utility that can move MP3 songs and other PC files onto the player. Although this means you can store documents in the Nomad's memory, there's precious little you can do with them until you download them again. MP3 files cannot be downloaded from the player.

The sound quality is good, and having a lightweight personal stereo with outstanding battery life is a thrilling prospect. However, our unit crashed three times during the first week of tests, and battery removal was the only solution. Almost worse, the two 32Mb pools of memory are not combined into one 64Mb lump, so you have to manually divide your one hour of music into two halves. This means you won't be able to store three 20 minute tracks, for instance.

This quality MP3 player is the best featured we've seen, but also the most expensive now that the Diamond Rio has been reduced in price. We've got to wonder at the wisdom of investing in a technology that will, no doubt, become much cheaper and better pretty soon.