I’ve done it. In a spur of the moment, I’ve popped down to Sim Lim and grabbed myself a Zen Vision:M for S$519. And here is my new toy:
It was sold out everywhere and this was the last one I could find. Here’s a quick and dirty review of it so far:
a. Love the design, love the interface, and the screen is pure beauty (256K colours vs. iPod’s 64K).
b. The sound quality seems to have improved, especially with the new bass booster (I used to own a Zen 20GB). However, I don’t have any quantitative proof of that.
c. The fact that you could theme the user interface is also very very cool (although I don’t know if you could do that with an iPod as well).
But I quickly came across some bad points as well - things that really irk me:
a. I tried showing off my Melbourne vacation photos to the rest of my family, and the Vision:M hung 3 times! I had to hunt for a needle to poke at the “Reset” hole. This was irksome to say the least, but it might have something to do with me transferring the photos at their full 1MB sizes without resampling or resizing.
b. The cover scratches so easily. I was forewarned about this, but it got scratched anyway. By cloth no less while wiping away the thumbprints that the gloss cover attracts like flies. Not that it is hugely noticable, but it’s noticeable enough under scrutiny to irk you as well.
c. I tried showing a small video to someone, and it went a bit nutters for a while. There isn’t a rewind or stop function, so you can’t skip back to the beginning of a video. That’s quite irritating.
Still - I really like it despite its flaws. There are so many other good things going for it, which other sites will do a better job of describing in their full on review (like CNET, Everything USB, Ployer et al).
Overall - I would recommend this to friends over the video iPod if they are looking for something other than the iconic cool factor. But if size really matters, I’m afraid the iPod still beats it. Personally though, the difference in size doesn’t really make too much of a difference to me.
