Creative Zen Nano Plus
This is a great active lifestyle or gym player. Small, light, and highly portable, the Zen Nano Plus is a high quality player with some great features. The 1 Gb version gives you plenty of song space, (up to 2hundred something songs).
I really like that the people at creative have designed this player with the athlete in mind. It is a tough, hardy unit that comes with a belt clip and an arm band which is great. Normally you’d have to buy the armband setup separately like with the Apple iPod shuffle. The Zen Nano Plus is really very light, which is an accomplishment considering that it still boasts an LCD screen, even though it is small. I find the LCD screen is handy, but on the other hand, I am one of those people who choose their music carefully, so I don’t really care what song is coming up. I actually enjoy the mystery, and that moment of pleasant surprise when a truly stupendous song comes on.
The Zen Nano Plus comes in several colors. I checked out the Black model. I like the simplistic design and the user-friendly controls. There are also some great playback extras that are sure to keep your ears glued to your headphones (hopefully not literally!) You can set a playback mode like shuffle, loop, etc. You can also set a playback sound type like rock, jazz, classical, etc. One of the cooler things that seems to save the “small lcd screen” issue, is that you can present the screen in different ways like for a left handed person or a right handed person.
This player is extremely easy to setup with your computer, and supports a variety of music file types.
All in all, the Zen Nano Plus is a good alternative to the iPod shuffle. The tradeoff comes down to more features for a slightly larger player.
View Pricing and Product Details for the Creative Zen Nano Plus.
Reviewed by Peter Ensio 02.28.2007