Creative Technology Zen Nano (512 MB) MP3 Player

I am sorely disappointed with Creative's Zen Nano.

I had rather high expectations from Creative, as they are the de facto kings of PC audio. I expected excellent sound quality and a generous volume level. I expected a simple and easy to use interface. I expected a reasonable amount of sturdiness. I expected an extremely simple method of connecting to my PC and transferring files.

What I got was a nice looking little white box with not enough buttons, messed up shuffle functionality, and seriously lacking sound quality and volume. On the good side of things, I didn't have any issues with connecting and transferring files from my PC.

None of which matter because the dratted thing is dead now. After less than six months, the Nano is trash. It started out by draining the battery really quickly if you tried to manually "shuffle" your music when the non-random mix of twelve-or-so tracks started becoming repetitive. You could go from full bars to blinking by manually advancing the track four times! Then it started to just cut off altogether if you tried to change the track. And just to make that one worse, it was sometimes repeating instead of advancing to the next song in it's not so random shuffle. After that, it wouldn't turn on sometimes. When it did, it would then play for a few seconds... and shut off. What worked for a little while was physically removing the battery, waiting a while for all the capacitors to discharge, and then quickly advancing to a new track as soon as the Nano started up. Finally, of course, it simply stopped turning on any more.

It's a shame really. I was quite impressed with the build quality in the battery compartment. I remember looking at it and thinking that here was a negative end spring that was really meant to last a long time through repeated battery changes. And now it just rides around in my glove box, awaiting the day I bring it in and dissect it. I would like to think that I just "lucked" out and got a lemon. The problem with that answer is that it doesn't account for the other negatives here, namely the lack of volume and the unimpressive sound quality. I've had two iRiver MP3 players now, and both of them not only blow the Nano away in battery life and volume, they both had very clearly superior sound quality.

I would strongly recommend looking elsewhere. It is possible that Creative's hard drive based portable audio devices are a significant improvement, but I am not paying to find out... and I am certainly not recommending any of their flash based players to anyone else.

Update :: 2007 June 13
A few weeks ago I finally brought the Nano inside and dissected it. The case is held together with mini tabs and glue. Warning, this is a one-way trip, so that once the case has been opened it just isn't going to snug back together nicely again.

Inside I found that the small piece of plastic used for the power button had shifted out of the correct position, which accounted for the Nano's inability to power on. I got rather excited at this point, as I thought that the errant button might have been the only problem. I was, sadly, not correct. While I certainly can turn the Nano on and off at will... the other problems still exist. It worked great for about an hour, but that was it. After that, it would play for less than a second and shut off. Sometimes it shuts off before it finishes inspecting the memory.

So while it is no longer a "dead" MP3 player, it is still completely useless. My rating for this player stands.