Creative Zen Micro 5GB vs. Apple iPod Mini 4GB
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Battery Life
Please note that an updated Battery Life page is now available here with more comprehensive tests and results.
The advertised battery life of the Zen Micro is 12 hours, which is 50% more than iPod Mini's 8 hours.
A 3.5mm-3.5mm audio cable was used to connect the player to the line-in of a computer, with software recording the audio input. The battery life is considered to be the time from which music starts playing till it stops (when the player switches off due to insufficient power). No songs are repeated throughout the playlist. For the Zen Micro, EQ was set to "Rock", with the volume at 20 out of 25. For the iPod Mini, EQ was set to "Rock", with the volume at about 75% (with output volume matching the Zen Micro, as according to our recording software).
| Device | Time |
| Zen Micro (MP3) | 9:15:09 |
| Zen Micro (WMA) | 5:35:05 |
| iPod Mini (MP3) | 6:17:44 |
The Zen Micro lasted 9 hours 15 minutes, nearly 3 hours short of the advertised time. Playing WMA files was worse. The player died after less than 6 hours. The iPod Mini lasted 6 hours 17 minutes, three hours lesser than the Zen Micro, and nearly two hours short of the advertised time. Note that the iPod Mini was a well-used review/display unit, as such the battery may be in a poorer condition.
Apple iPod Mini
Problems
If you are using the bundled earphones, or any cheaper types, the iPod Mini sounds quite flat. The EQ presets don't help much. A custom EQ would have been welcomed. When browsing through music, titles that are too long are truncated, and the iPod Mini does not scroll them. This is minor, but can get irritating if you have numerous albums or songs with long titles. Also, there isn't the option to view track info before playing it.
Battery isn't impressive, and it still isn't removable, so if the battery dies, it means shipping the iPod Mini back to Apple. Also, there is no smart power-cutoff. That is, even if the iPod Mini is fully charged, if you remove it from the power source and plug it back after some time, it will go through the whole charging process again. I also encountered an occassional bug where I was stuck at the "About" screen, could scroll up and down, but could not get back to the menu. In the end I had to reset the iPod Mini.
Creative Zen Micro
Problems
With all the hype put out by Creative, the Zen Micro certainly cannot meet up to all the expectations.
First of all, the battery life is far from its advertised time. Granted, 9 hours playback is still more than the iPod Mini's 6 hours, but Creative still should not mislead its customers.
Next, the vertical touchpad isn't all that great. In my opinion, I still prefer the iPod's circular touchpad, because you can scroll continuously. With the vertical touchpad, you have to lift your thumb several times to scroll through a long list. Add the weird sensitivity problem (probably due to such a small touchpad area), and you might end up accidentally selecting something if you only intended to scroll one item up or down. But Creative is lucky to have such a, well, creative marketing team to justify the use of a vertical touchpad. Honestly I found their tagline, "no more going round in circles" rather funny.
Although the Zen Micro is generally quite responsive, there are times when it appears sluggish, and this can get somewhat irritating, especially if, say, you press a button and nothing seems to be happening, and you press the button again. And when the player finally responds, you are a few steps further from what you intended to do. Shutting down the player also takes quite a long time.
Creative claims the Zen Micro can store 2500 songs, 1500 more songs than the iPod Mini. Unfortunately this is more hype to deceive the consumer. How can a 5GB player store more than double the songs of a 4GB player? Yes, the Zen Micro can store 2500 songs, but in WMA format at 64kbps. And "1500 more songs" is compared to music stored in AAC format at 128kbps. So obviously if you store files at a lower quality, you can store more!
I did a comprehensive test on MP3, WMA and AAC at different bitrates. I'm not going to go into the details, but suffice to say, MP3 at 64kbps is ridiculous. You should not even consider it. If you don't have a high-end pair of headphones, then WMA and AAC at 64kbps sound pretty decent. Using the bundled earphones, I could not tell a difference between 64kbps and 128kbps. One thing though. The Zen Micro failed to play the WMA Lossless file, and was extremely sluggish when playing a WMA-VBR (variable bitrate) file.
Finally, I feel I need to touch on the fact that everything about the Zen Micro seems copied from the iPod. Mr Sim did admit that when the iPod Mini came out (while the Zen Micro was still being developed), the engineers struggled to match its features. Right from the start, from the sliding outer box, to the flap that opens up to reveal the player, to the white accessories, and the universal power adapter, to the "Clicker", to the navigation system, all these were part of the iPod. So with a company name like Creative, it seems rather ironic.
Update (29 Dec 2004): Creative has released new firmware (v2.00.12) that fixes a battery problem when using the AC Adaptor, as well as reduced the sensitivity of the touchpad. When in locked mode, the player now does not pop up a "Player locked" dialog when the touchpad is touched. Also, the player is now PlaysForSure compatible (although it still cannot play WMA Lossless files). Foreign language music files are now automatically detected when being transferred. Windows Media Player 10 can also convert MP3 with foreign language tags into WMA and keep the existing tags (MediaSource reads the tags as "???").
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