Creative Zen Neeon 5GB Review
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Navigation System
So what does Creative cram inside the tiny, 4-line LCD display?
When you switch on the Zen Neeon, you will see a "Loading Music" screen. Then it will show the current track.
Pushing the Scroller button brings up the menu.
As you can see, each screen only shows three options.
Going to "Browse" lets you browse your music, according to the folder structure that was transferred to the Zen Neeon. Push the Scroller, or press "Play" and the current selected track will play.
The Zen Neeon doesn't playback songs as per album. Instead, if you play a track from an album, the player will play sequentially until the end of the current album, and carry on playing the next album. The good news is, the "Play Mode" lets you repeat the current folder only.
The Zen Neeon come with 4 EQ presets, Rock, Jazz, Classical and Pop, as well as a 5-band custom EQ. I actually do not mind that there are only so few presets, since 4 useful presets are definitely better than a whole bunch of useless presets (bass boost, bass cut, treble boost, treble cut... who uses them??). In fact, having a custom EQ is already giving the user endless number of EQ choices.
The next option lets you delete the current track.
I'm guessing it is more useful for deleting your recordings.
Next, is the "Settings" screen.
"LED Colors" brings us to an interesting feature of the Zen Neeon.
If you set "Random", the LED colour will keep changing. Note that the actual colours of the LED are lighter than what is shown above. They look more like the ones below.
The information screen.
Next, we come to the "Microphone" screen. Unlike the Zen Micro, the Zen Neeon does not have a sound level monitor. It's not a big issue, just something I noticed.
Where the Zen Micro only could record in a low quality IMA ADPCM format, the Zen Neeon can also record in MP3 at 96kbps, 128kbps, and even 160kbps. The recording bitrate can set set for voice, FM and line-in recording.
Next we come to the "FM Radio". Reception has been greatly improved over the Zen Micro. But scrolling through the frequencies takes a very long time, especially if the frequencies are overcrowded.
Pushing the Scroller brings up the following screen, which allows you to "Record FM" or change the mode of the Scroller. You can save the station to a preset, or let the Zen Neeon do an "Autoscan".
Finally, we come to the "Line-In Recording".
"Track Detection" might seem like a good idea, but it's detection is totally crappy. It might work for normal pop or rock tunes, but when I tried recording Dies Irae, at the soft parts, the Track Detection just stopped recording and prepared to record the next "track". When the volume went up a little, it proceeded to record, then stop again when the volume went down. Note when I say "soft parts", I mean that the music is still audible. I guess Creative had to choose between precise silence, and slight noise due to unclean source, and decided to err a bit more. Still, the quality of the recorded tracks are pretty good. For the technically inclined, the Zen Neeon recorded track at 160kbps had a high frequency cut-off at about 10-12KHz, while the same track encoded by LAME had a cut-off at about 16KHz.
There's also one thing you should note about the menu system. At the relevant screens, if you scroll further below, it will show the main menu options. So in the midst of some screen, if you decided to change your mind, you can just scroll down and start to browse for music, or go to the Settings screen.