Hooray for My Music
by Dave
My first week with the Zen has been very fun. It’s so strange to listen to whatever I want in the car. I just have to remember not to watch videos while I’m driving, or I’ll end up in the Bad/Stupid Drivers category.
The Burlingames
Chronicling the adventures of the B's
The Burlingames 
I have zero experience when it comes to the Zen. How’d you decide to choose that over the ever popular iPod?
To answer the easy question first, I don’t think I can scrobble with it. I’ll look into that tomorrow.
My decision was made fairly simple by the specs I was looking for in a player. I wanted something with flash memory (minimum 16 gigs to hold all my music) and the price had to be reasonable.
At the time I started shopping a couple months ago, 16 gigs was the max for flash players. In that category there were three options; iPod Touch, Sansa View, and the Zen. I ruled out the Touch since I have about 15.5 gigs of music and would outgrow it too soon. Both the View and Zen have expandable memory (the View has a microSD slot and the Zen regular SD).
I bought the View because it was the cheapest. I liked it, but there were some small glitches in the firmware. I tried out a Zen and decided that was the way to go after returning the View. Fortunately, while I was waiting to scrape together the extra cash for the Zen, Creative announced the 32 gig version. That seemed a better solution than adding an SD card since the higher capacity SD cards are pretty spendy anyway.
Apple and Sansa have also announced 32 gig versions of their players. I’m not sure what the Sansa runs, but the new Touch is crazy-expensive ($500). It’s cool, but not $500 cool.
I actually considered the new Zune after trying one out at a couple stores. The interface is phenomenal. the sound is amazing, and the player itself is much nicer-looking than version one. I read terrible things, though, about the software.
I’ll bring the Zen to church next time I’m there so you can check it out.
Wow, good job doing your homework.
In my opinion he has been shopping for more than a few months. He has been looking and oggling for a long time. :)