Creative Zen Xtra

It seems not a month goes by without Creative releasing a new portable music player. A year ago we looked at the original Zen, which came with a 20Gb hard disk and was £70 more expensive.

The Zen Xtra comes with an extra 10Gb, which means you can store around 8,000 tracks in either WMA or MP3 file format. Music is transferred to the player using Creative MediaSource, which is an improved version of the Creative Playcenter audio file management software. Here you can 'rip' CDs to be shifted to the player or drag and drop existing digital audio files.

It's not possible to record directly from an external source but you can use the Nomad Explorer program to drag and drop non-audio data using a Windows Explorer-style interface. It uses USB 2 but it will also work in regular USB.

The large blue display looks nice but navigating the menus using its small jog wheel is a little tricky. It's also slow to update.

Creative seems to have gone backwards in terms of build quality. The original Zen was finished in aluminium while the new version has a less pleasing anodised finish and is also slightly larger.

Contact: Creative
www.europe.creative.com