ZEN X-Fi - award-winning X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity Audio

Experience your MP3 music as the artist originally intended with ZEN X-Fi - the first player to restore the quality of compressed music with award-winning X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity Audio technology.

Indulge in rich audio where you can hear your music in crystal clear clarity. Take in guitar strumming, crisp cymbal clashes and deep pounding bass as detail lost during file compression are now beautifully restored. The built-in X-Fi technology intelligently moves a conventional left/right earphone stereo source away from your ears, virtually expanding it for an audio experience with a breathtakingly realistic depth of field. You'll feel as if you were listening to your music from a pair of high end speakers.

Built with X-Fi technology
Experience the very essence of music perfection as you listen to audio in crystal clear clarity. Hear your music the way it was always meant to be heard.

True mobility
You can now stream music and photos wirelessly from your PC to your player within a home network. With the ZEN X-Fi, experience the sound of perfection wherever you go.

Wide audio support
Listen to your music in multiple supported formats such as MP3, WMA and AAC, including non-protected .m4a files from iTunes® Plus. Download Creative Centrale to rip, transfer and manage your media content easily.

The X-Fi has better sound, superb headphones, an amazing feature set, expandable storage via an SD card slot, an easy-to-use interface that will please users who don't want to work with a touch screen, and--here's the kicker--the ability to stream and download music from your PC wirelessly. It looks great, too, and it costs about half as much as Apple's current Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch players.The masses may continue to think iPod first when they need a new MP3 player--but it will be a shame if they do. The X-Fi is arguably the most innovative, feature-packed player on the market, and it's an absolute steal for the price

Zen Mosaic for Creative

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.