Creative Zen Stone Plus
27 JUL 2007
Launch price
£50.00
Stuff says
A Zen Stone with a screen and double the storage sounds like a recipe for success, but too many ingredients have spoiled a potentially Shuffle-beating dish
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As the saying goes: if it ain’t broke, er, don’t add a screen to it. But Creative is a maverick and while we’ve barely had time to listen to all the songs on our ordinary Zen Stone, it’s lobbed this in our direction – the 2GB Zen Stone Plus, for those of us who just can’t handle a screenless MP3 life.
With the same budget look of the standard Stone, we were expecting a pimped up version of Creative’s cheapest MP3 spinner, which, in a way, we got. It’s just a shame that such minor additions in functionality have overcomplicated what was a great little Shuffle rival.
Screen dreams?
The new circular OLED screen is about the size of a 1p coin and shows track info and a battery indicator during normal playback – so far, so handy. But delve into the menu system and its slow and clunky operation will just make you furious. We often found ourselves putting it on random simply to avoid having to navigate it.
Similarly, while the regular Stone was up and ready to go in next to no time, the Plus has a good old think before it’s willing to start pumping out tunes.
There’s a new programmable shortcut button that seems slightly pointless and has infuriatingly replaced the ‘skip to next folder’ function. With no facility to browse by artist or album it now takes an age to cycle from Aphex Twin to Yeah Yeah Yeahs.