Creative has been selling MP3 players for a very long time. We remember their first flash based Nomad MP3 player which was an amazing device for its time and later on the Jukebox- one of the first hard drive based MP3 players. Today, we take a look at their recently released Zen MicroPhoto player sporting an 8GB Microdrive.

The Zen MicroPhoto is packed nicely in a small box with the battery, earbuds, a carrying pouch, a USB cable, the drivers CD and a users manual in quite a few different languages- however Arabic is missing. The carrying pouch is a bit big in size and a better idea would’ve been to include a carrying case like the ones used with Mobile phones. The earbuds included in the packaging are also of decent quality, although we’re sure that audiophiles will use their own.

We received the unit in white color, however its available in a wide range of colors from red and green to purple and blue- personally, we like the blue, black, red and purple ones best. The Zen MicroPhoto measures at 51 x 83 x 17.2mm – smaller than a pack of cigarettes in every dimension. However, it’s just a tad bit heavy at 115g and might weigh down in your pocket.  Although we must say the extra weight makes the unit’s build quality feel quite solid.

The front of the unit features all the navigation controls you’ll use such as the skip buttons and menu/back button while the top has the power button, the headphone jack and the USB connector. When the unit is powered up, a glow surrounds the unit and also acts as a backlight for the buttons. We like the simplicity in the design.

In the front, you also have the vertical touch bar that’s used to move up and down the menus as well as tapped for selecting the highlighted item. Often times, we found the unit tapped when we didn’t want it to. Also, the skip buttons needed to be tapped a couple of times to work when the screen was off. We think that a slight clicking mechanism would’ve worked better than the touch system which is either overly or under sensitive- even after customizing it in the settings.

Feature-wise, the Zen MicroPhoto is loaded. Creative packs a whopping 8GB drive which is excellent for its size and can store roughly 4000 songs while an FM player is also included in case you’re up for something different. You also have a voice recorder which could come in handy. Although the unit can display pictures, the 1.5” screen is a bit small for that purpose. Surprisingly, while viewing pictures, your music stops playing which isn’t what one would expect and Creative should fix this. Another usability feature that can be worked on is that currently, both the skip keys and the vertical touch bar move between the pictures- a better idea would be to use the touch pad for zooming in and out of images.

Creative use a 262,144-color OLED display which makes it easy to look at from any angle, however, we feel that the screen resolution could’ve been increased as text can appear a bit pixilated. The colors on the other hand look magnificent as long as you’re indoors. The Dubai sun is not something this player can handle and you’ll barely be able to see anything on screen in broad daylight.