Art From Music

Author's Rating:

Pros: Aesthetics, easy music transfer

Cons: Large body

The Bottom Line: 
As if the music isn't good enough, bring it all together with the art of a mosaic.

Author's Review
This past week I had the opportunity to test out the new Creative Zen Mosaic. While it is similar to the Zen V on the inside, it screams different on the outside. Creative has taken a great MP3 player, juiced up the inside, jazzed up the outside, and really made a fantastic successor to an already impressive product.

The first thing anyone notices about the Mosaic is its wild design for an MP3 player. It is far from the understated elegance of an iPod and if that little wonder is the Upper East Side, then the Mosaic is all Chelsea. For those of you not in the know on New York locales, that means this is one artsy music player. The front controls are literally composed of a mosaic of tiles in various colors. The Mosaic comes in three colors and the hue of the tiles varies with the dominant color of the player. While the pink screams cute girl, any guy would feel more than manly enough walking around with the black model or even the gender neutral gray model.

This player is slightly larger than some of the others in the Creative line. The Mosaic measures approximately 3 inches by 1.5 inches by 0.5 inches. It is somewhat on the large side to be carried in hand while jogging or performing other athletic maneuvers, but its style is more suited to walking and it fits quite nicely into a pants pocket with minimal bulge. The screen on this player also measures on the decently large side at 1.8 inches. It is very bright and displays pictures with all their native clarity, but like its smaller Creative siblings, the Mosaic is also not qualified to be a real video player. The screen size is simply too small and it lacks the quality to draw you in as the iPod screens tend to do (anyone familiar with the NYC subway system can attest to the iPod induced station-missing).

The buttons on the player are nicely integrated into the greater tile scheme of the Mosaic. Nine of the tiles comprise the controls and include 4 directional buttons, a select button, menu, play, back, and a shortcut button. The buttons, although not as separated as those on the iPod do have a nice raised surface to accommodate those of burly hands. There

Music playback is easily set by the user as music can be sorted by almost any specification imaginable. Also, as with the other Creative players, music can also be sorted by folder so that seemingly disparate music might be played together. Navigation through the menus is simple thanks to the dedicated select and back buttons and the directional keys allow for selection of criteria.

Adding content is made easy if you already have Windows Media Player installed. If you choose not to use that program, you can also add music simply by dragging and dropping while the player is plugged in via USB. Adding video is slightly more complicated beucase it must be in the AVI format. The included software includes a convertor so that all videos may be easily changed to the proper format. There is also a separate program for the control of podcasts.

As with all the Creative players, a few extra features are tossed in. In my experience most of them, including personal information management and a built in microphone, are fairly useless. There are some though, that I think are an excellent addition, like the FM radio receiver. This allows you some options when you tire of the staid repertoire being replayed ad-nausea and you crave some of the teeny bopping tunes of the local pop stations. Another added feature rarely seen on players like this is an external speaker so that all the people near you can enjoy your music. While the speaker is not particularly loud, it does have fairly good sound quality and is good enough to entertain in the car or while sitting at a desk.

The audio quality of this player is fantastic and while the included headphones are generally not up to anyone's par, the pair that came with these was fairly respectable. When I put my Ink'd noise isolating headphones in the player, it went from a pretty good sounding budget device to a really superb player that deserves some recognition among the audiophiles out there.

The battery life is rated to be in excess of 30 hours by the people at Creative and I have yet to disprove them. I accidently left the player on in my bag all day this past Wednesday, and even with all the other days that I used the player, I still have yet to charge it - that being after ~25 hours of discharge.