Creative has carved out a well-deserved reputation for producing high quality audio equipment and sound cards, and its Zen range of MP3 players has built up a solid fan base for those who can't afford or simply don't wish to follow the iPod route.The Zen Mosaic is essentially a replacement for the Zen V Plus and storage comes in the form of 2GB, 4GB, 8GB or 16GB of flash memory (the 16GB version due at the end of the summer). No prizes for guessing why they dreamed up the new name for this player, as the distinctive tiled design on the front comes in three colours: black, silver and pink.
It's designed to be ultra compact, fitting snugly and smoothly in your palm. It weighs in at a feather-light 43g and measures just 79.5mm x 40mm x 12.8mm. Instead of the usual touch control dial, Creative has opted for button controls, using nine of the mosaic tiles to guide you around the menus. Although this cleverly conceals the function keys, it also makes them virtually invisible to operate which could prove frustrating, especially in low light conditions.
In place of the V Plus's 1.5inch OLED screen, the Mosaic has a larger 1.8-inch LCD colour screen and an additional attraction is a built-in speaker which allows you to take your headphones out for a while and listen both to music and to the FM radio, the latter with up to 32 preset stations. One battery charge gives you a more than reasonable 32 hours of audio playback and you can perform voice recordings via the discreetly positioned microphone.
The price range is competitive, with the 2GB model costing £49.99 (and holding around 1,000 tracks), moving up to the 8,000-song 16GB version coming in at £119.99.
Designed to store photos and videos as well as music, the Mosaic comes with the new Creative Centrale software, a media management application that organizes, tags, creates playlists and transcodes video to AVI format. It swiftly and efficiently gathers all the relevant media folders on your hard drive and catalogues them, ready to be made into playlists. Supported audio formats include MP3, WMA, WMA-DRM 10 and Audible (Format 4).
The interface is the standard Zen menu system which is easy to navigate but is only Windows XP and Vista compatible. The only annoyance is there's no immediately accessible volume control so you have to dive into the menu every time you want to adjust it. The sound quality, however, is as exceptional as ever and for sheer listening pleasure you'll get maximum enjoyment for a small outlay.
Creative has also announced a number of useful peripherals including a Docking Speaker System, a soft pouch with carabiner clip, an armband and the set of all three skins.
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