What It Is: The Zen, Creative’s credit-card-sized answer to the iPod Nano.
Who It’s For: Anyone with subscription tunes from Napster, Rhapsody and their ilk, or TV shows and movies purchased and downloaded from Amazon Unbox or Wal-Mart.

Why It’s Worthy: You can get thousands of songs onto it for the nice price of $12 or so a month (the average subscription rate for most online music services), and increasingly the selection of TV shows available on sites like Amazon Unbox is beginning to rival, if not surpass, the selection on the iTunes store. Plus, the horizontally oriented screen is bigger and wider than the one on the new iPod Nano. Besides, 16-gigabytes (GB) of memory on the premium model is twice the size of the biggest Nano (at 8GB). And it works not only with the proprietary Creative music management software, but also with WIndows Media Player (right out of the box).
Our Only Complaint: The plastic exterior and light weight feels cheap, compared to the metallic Nano, and we had some glitchy performance with our test unit (it kept crashing!).
Price/Where to Get It: $129.99 (4GB); $199.99 (8GB); $249.99 (16GB); www.creative.com/products/mp3/zen/


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