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Creative Labs Zen Neeon Review - Hardware

The Creative Neeon Zen is one of the newer members of it's large range of portable music players, and this time brings their unit's down even further in size. The Neeon is one of it's smallest whilst offering a very large 5gb capacity for it's size. Neeon is in a way a slightly re-designed version of the existing Creative Zen Micro, with a larger emphasis on being trendy.

Creative Labs has been offering MP3 players for a while now, and many seem to forget that they were making a foray into the portable music market well before the iPod turned things on it's head.

What comes in the box:

• Creative Zen Neeon
• Protective felt pouch
• Stik-On cover
• Bud earphones
• USB cable
• Line in/out 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter cable

Initial Impressions

Open the box, and the Neeon initially looks fairly impressive. About the size of some of the smaller flip mobile phones, it packs a large 5 gigabytes of playback into a small space into your palm. Measured dimensions were 46mm across x 80mm tall x 16mm thick. It fronts a stylish shiny black face, with a brushed aluminium back (available in a number of different colours).

Also included is a standard 'Stik-On' cover, which is really just a durable sticker that can be applied to the unit to jazz it up a little (see screenshots). It works pretty well, and gives some personality to an otherwise fairly bland looking unit. Many other funky Stick-On designs are available from Creative Labs to suit your mood. Inclusion of a quality felt pouch also adds a nice extra protection if you wish to prevent scratches and things over time.

The unit sports two chromed buttons for volume control, and also the important 'lock' switch to prevent accidental button pressing in your pocket. On the right is one button for playing and pausing tracks, and to navigate the player, there is a miniature navigation wheel. At first this comes across as one of the more flimsy and cheap looking parts of the device, even though in actuality it seemed fairly durable. More on this later.

On the top you'll find a mini USB port, for charging and transfer of music, a pin sized microphone, and a little un-usual for an MP3 player, a 2.5mm line-in port to allow recording from an external source if required.

While the unit itself doesn't suffer any major design problems, unfortunately as you start delve more into the unit's functionality, this is where things start to fall down.

Hardware

The Zen Neeon is hard drive based, meaning inside is stashed a very tiny hard drive. This allows some 2,500 songs, or around 166 hours of music (nearly 1 full week!). Until most recently, when flash memory of gigabytes has become available, for the size, the storage would have been quite amazing. Now it's a little more so-so.

Thankfully, like most Creative players, it supports standard MP3, (continued next page)