Although the assessment of sound quality varies with each individual, we felt that the Zen provided sharp, clear and rich sounds equal to, if not slightly better than, our various iPods. As with most players of this type, you can adjust the EQ, bass and other audio settings to your liking. The Zen has 8 EQ settings: acoustic, classical, disco, jazz, new age, pop, rock and vocal. The Zen will play MP3, WMA, non-protected AAC, WAV and Audible formats 2, 3 and 4.

If you are a fan of audio books, you will find it very easy to set up and play Audible books on the Zen. The Zen also has a special Zencast website where you can find a wealth of podcasts and videos to play on your Zen.

Although not as sleek as the iPod controls, the Zen’s controls are easy to use. We would have liked to see a dedicated “main menu” button or the ability to make the shortcut button go to the main menu. Instead it often required several clicks of the back button to get back to the main menu. The main menu choices include Microphone, Photos, Music, Videos, FM Radio, Extras (Date & Time, Calendar, Tasks, and Contacts), Memory Card, and System Settings.

The microphone is useful for making short voice notes.  Although the FM radio is only powerful enough to pull in major or nearby radio stations, it will be useful for talk radio junkies and will also be valuable for tuning in to the FM station being transmitted at the health club. The FM radio has 32 presets.

The Zen also has the ability to sync with Microsoft Outlook for calendar, tasks, and contacts. Yet with no dedicated key or quick way to get to that functionality, we found we didn’t use it much.

Like many other MP3 players, the Zen can also display photos and photo slide shows. It only supports JPEG photos but has transcoding for GIF, TIFF, PNG, and BMP.  Photos are vibrant on the Zen screen. And the Zen also gives you the ability to zoom into the pictures and/or rotate them right in the player.

The video support is also impressive. The Zen supports MJPEG and WMV9 with transcoding for MPEG1 and 2, MPEG4-SP, DivX 4 Divx 5 and XviD. Transcoding and moving the videos to the device is easy with the included software. Even though the screen is fairly small, the videos looked great.

Although the SD card support is a wonderful feature, the SD card data is not integrated with the data on the player. So when you want to access music or videos on the card, you have to go back to the main menu and choose the Memory Card option to access that content. It would be much better if that content were integrated, but we still found ways to use it quite easily. We kept one memory card with videos and one with playlists of certain types of music. As long as you are willing to organize your content collection to this idiosyncrasy, it is not a huge inconvenience.

Creative rates the battery life at up to 30 hours of continuous audio or five hours of continuous video playback.  Unfortunately like all iPods, the battery is only factory replaceable.