I have been listening to my iRiver on the way to work. Its good to start getting some use out of it again and, although its a bit quirky and idiosyncratic, I still really like it. I can’t remember if it is now four-and-a-half or five-and-a-half years since I got it but it is still going strong. Or at least it was until Monday evening.
When I tried to turn it on before leaving work it just would not boot. It was locked in its startup phase. When I got home I tried the reset button and that did nothing, so I tried it a dozen more times. I had to conclude that the thing had finally died and assumed that was the logical result of taking a hard drive-based player on the road. So I started looking on the net for potential replacements.
I figured that a solid state player would be better and resigned myself to having a mere 4Gb or 8Gb player and having to keep swapping the music on it. The only larger capacity players I could find were iPods and there is no way I am getting one of them – I think I am allergic to iTunes or something. And then I found the Creative Zen 32Gb player.
Unbelievable. More capacity than the iRiver but in solid state, and for only £150. Not only that but it plays WMA, has a radio, you can just drag and drop files onto it, its tiny, has a decent battery life, you can put SD memory cards into it, and can view photos and videos on it as well. It still will not do direct encoding like the iRiver, or support OGG files like the iRiver, and it does not have a remote or optical line-in and line-out like the iRiver, but on paper it looks very good indeed. Jayne and Charlie have had Creative players before and I always found them easy to use and with a good sound quality. The radio function was good too.
Just as I was starting to get excited about a new toy, I had one last try at the reset button – this time with the mains cable plugged in – and the iRiver sprung to life. Now I feel guilty about flirting with the Creative: I hope the iRiver never finds out. At least I now know that when it does finally conk out I will be able to get something with the same capacity (or even higher) that doesn’t depend on iTunes.
That wasn’t flirting – that was serious geek porn-surfing. I just hope the iRiver never finds out as that kind of behaviour if very hard to forgive and impossible to forget…..
I actually found the player on a website where it was £200 and thought it was a bargain, and Creative are selling it direct for £250 – so £150 from Amazon is so tempting…
A flash memory machine might be more sensible on bumpy roads than a hard drive one anyway. Jayne reminded me of when I was tempted by the Creative 60Gb machine and then when I finally decided to buy it the price had gone up by £100 so I never did.
I could keep the iRiver as the bedside stereo, as I have been doing for a while now. But that would be a move into full-blown geek bigamy wouldn’t it?
Wired For Sound // Aug 29, 2008 at 1:48 am
[…] my false alarm when I thought my iRiver had died, I did actually take the plunge and I invested in a Creative Zen. I use the word […]