Between the devil and the deep blue sea

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When my son asked for a new MP3 with video player to replace his ancient Creative Zen micro I thought a new 8GB Creative ZEN will be a nice replacement. However the Zen micro units and the Zen V Plus have not been very reliable (at least not mine). It seems the obvious choice would be to go iPod nano. An option I would agree with but because my iPod decided not to allow writing new songs anymore a few weeks ago.

Several things seemed to favor the 8GB Creative ZEN: screen size almost double that of Ipod, a built-in radio and a built-in microphone enabling the use of the unit as a voice recorder. On the cons it was the size and thickness factors that played against Creative's.

Unfortunately, the 8GB unit was not easy to find, but somehow Santa managed to get one just in time. It was a disappointment to discover the unit display did not to work just after opening the box. However, just to follow the instructions we fully charged the unit and transfered a whole bunch of songs (data transfer worked ok) just to realize the initial assessment was just right. The display did not work.

Tomorrow I am going to return the unit to the shop but I am not sure whether they will have more units or not. On the other hand, I am not sure I am going to stick with Creative anymore. I do not like brands that do this to me.

Update: It took them almost half an hour to figure out the unit was not working (PC CITY). I was offered the unit on display or a refund. I took the latter. I tried to buy an iPod but they were locked inside a transparent container. I tried to get a shop attendant but none were available. I walk away after cashing my refund to go to the next shop (MediaMarkt) where I bought an iPod nano (there you could just pick up the unit).

BTW, no software comes with iPod nano. They seem to assume you'll have Internet access at home and you'll figure out how to download and install iTunes. For the moment the iPod nano works fine and transferring 7GB of MP3 music was ok. The only problem is that many of the CD covers were not automatically downloaded, just some of them were figured out ok.

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