Creative have had an MP3 player on the market for pretty much the same amount of time as Apple has, but the Zen has always been the bridesmaid to the iPod, they’ve just never quite been able to crack it. I’ve always thought this was a pity, as the Zens have had some features that the iPod could not, or more specifically, would not have. Ben Mansill at AtomicMPC seems to think that the Zen Vision: M may just do it this time:

All that has been turned upside-down now. Within just a minute of playing with the new Zen Vision: M you know that this is the player to own all players. It is clear that Creative invested heavily in making the Vision: M the very best possible player. This is not a rebadged Chinese clone, it is not a hobbled together gadget from off the shelf parts. It is an exquisitely designed and engineered product that, finally, towers over every portable media player currently available.

The one feature that’s always attracted me is that you don’t need to use iTunes, and you don’t need to let it mangle your filenames & directory structure. The Creative Zens have always just mapped themselves as another haddrive when you plug them in, so you can do whatever you want with the files. They have provided the ‘Zen Explorer’ to manage the files if you want, but it’s always been a bit redundant seeing as you can just copy the files yourself. As Ben Mansill in the review says There’s no iTunes nonsense, you manage your files the way you want to, not how someone else tells you to.

Other coolness:

The Zen also functions as a picture viewer, and again, every format under the sun is supported. There’s an FM radio receiver and recorder and a built-in microphone, too. It will also output to TV via a sold separately cable. It will output either PAL or NTSC, selectable from the menu.

Like I said, I want one. It hasn’t been released in Australia yet, apparently it’s due around March/April 2006, but ebay seems to be having them for around AU$450. Still a wee bit beyond my price range at the moment, but my birthday’s in 3 days so… :)