Creative Zen Stone Plus 2GB review

Designed to be an iPod Shuffle beater, the Zen Stone succeeds on several fronts. It’s got a tiny screen so you can actually browse tracks, assuming your eyesight is especially keen; there’s an FM radio built in; and it’s cheaper. Oh, and there’s a speaker on the back of the MP3 player, so you can delight fellow passengers on the bus with your exquisite taste in hardcore ragga.


Pros
The Zen Stone’s sound is a lot more involving than the iPod Shuffle’s and it supports drag-and-drop addition of music, rather than forcing you to use iTunes, WMP or some proprietary nightmare software. It’s tiny but the screen is still usable and build is generally pretty satisfactory. There’s also a mono recorder, which comes in handy for memos, but is perhaps not quite up to the task of satisfactorily bootlegging Radiohead concerts.

Cons
If you get this tiny plastic lump out in public in 2009, people will think you’ve either fallen on hard times or fallen through a time warp from about 2006. The FM radio is not really worth the bother, and if you use the horrible, tinny little speaker in public, you deserve to be defenestrated. There’s no clip of any kind, so gym goers will have to clench it between their steely buttocks instead.

In summary then…
A more-than-credible iPod alternative, the Zen Stone is outrageously cheap, sounds great, feels robust enough for gym-pounders and has a few extra features as a kind of icing on top of the tiny-budget-MP3-player cake. Particularly if you’re not an iTunes user, it’s the obvious choice for the cash-strapped customer.

Main formats supported
MP3, AAC, WMA (including protected WMA)

Sound quality

Style

Build

Features

Overall

Like the sound of this MP3 player? Get chatting about the Creative Zen Stone Plus 2GB on the PriceRunner forums.

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