Review: Creative Zen 4GB portable media player

What with the iPod's domination of video and music players it’s sometimes hard to remember that there are other brands, but the Zen 4GB from Creative is well worth considering.

Such a player can hold some 1,000 songs. We didn't fill it up, but after adding three average-length films and 250 songs we still had room for more.

The Zen 4GB has a 2.5in screen and is capable of video playback at full speed - some players drop frames from the video, making watching action films less fun, but that's not a problem with this one.

An extremely clear screen and great sound quality from the supplied headphones often made us think we were viewing video from the comfort of a living room. Luckily we remembered just in time before trying to get comfortable and put our feet up on the train's seats.

The music player is sleek and small, and fitted easily into a pocket. However, the navigation buttons, which sit on the right-hand side of the player, are small and fiddly to use, especially if your fingers are larger than average.

Once we had mastered it, navigating the attractive menu system was straightforward. The index navigation, which lets users search by the initial letter of each artist, is impressive and made it quick and easy to find songs. Album of the Day, on a click, chooses a random selection of tracks from a random album and plays them, which also meant not having to keep taking the player out of our pocket.

As with video, audio quality is excellent, and even at full blast it retained its class, with clear and undistorted music at deafness-inducing volume. The FM tuner worked well. A battery life of up to 25 hours of music playback is claimed, and we were able to watch a 90-minute film and listen to several hours of music without any problems.

It plays lots of common video formats and unlike the iPod, music and video can be transferred with a standard USB cable and Windows.

Vista compatible: Yes