Creative Zen Stone Plus: its screen is a major benefit

The original Zen Stone followed the iPod shuffle’s philosophy: if you’ve only got a limited amount of songs stored, you don’t need a screen on your music player. It’s a heavy-handed ‘we tell you what to like’ approach that Apple pulls off well, but for companies that don’t have the revered iPod brand to fall back on, practicality becomes more important.

The latest Zen Stone Plus is actually the third iteration of the product line. The intermediate version added a small OLED display, and the current model adds a built-in speaker and extended battery life (up to 20 hours) into the mix. As with previous models, it packs in a lot more features than you’d think possible in such a tiny frame, including an FM radio, stop watch and voice recorder.

Sitting at the entry-level end of Creative’s MP3 player range, the Zen Stone Plus suits active users that rank portability above song choice. It comes with 2GB of flash memory – good for around 500 songs – and is bundled with a clear gel skin that you can clip to your bag or clothing. The player also has a lanyard loop but a wrist or neck strap isn’t supplied.

Creative has opted for a more grown-up look with the latest Zen Stone Plus. It still has the same shape and button layout, but the casing uses a demure matte finish (as opposed to the glossy sheen on its predecessor), and the available colours – black, pink, blue and champagne – are more subdued.

Regardless of what Apple’s marketing mavericks may claim, having a screen to navigate through your music library – however small – is infinitely better that not having one at all. Creative has incorporated a round OLED display on one half of the player, and the other half houses the five-way control pad.

The menu system is intuitive for the most part, but navigating through music – presumably the one task you’ll be doing most of – is more complicated than it needs to be. Instead of grouping tracks by ID3 tag, everything is organised by folder, which would be fine if you didn’t have to exit from the Music section and go to the Options section, select the Browse Music setting, choose the folder you want to browse through, then go back to the Music section to scroll through the tracks one by one whenever you wanted to switch to another folder.

The Zen Stone Plus supports all the major audio codecs, namely MP3, WMA, AAC and Audible. The voice recorder records in the MP3 format, but there’s no option to record FM radio. On the whole, we were pleased with the Zen’s audio quality. The bundled earphones don’t do it justice, but plugged into a decent set of headphones it delivers strong bass and a pleasingly-clear mid-range. Playback options include multiple shuffle and repeat settings, five equaliser presets, a custom EQ and a bass boost setting.

Another tick in the Zen Stone Plus’ favour is the quality of the built-in speaker. Considering the player’s tiny size, it delivers a powerful sound from the rear-mounted grill that’s louder than the speakers on most mobile phones. A shortcut key on the top edge can be configured to launch any of the Zen’s different features, but by default it’s set to turn the speaker on and off.

Loading music onto the Zen Stone Plus couldn’t be easier. It mounts as a standard external hard drive in Windows, and you can simply drag folders onto its drive name. It also works seamlessly within Windows Media Player. The packaging doesn’t explicitly mention support for Mac, but you can drag songs and folders onto it through Finder and it’s even recognised in iTunes.