Creative Zen

Creative Technology's Zen Vision M hard drive based portable media player was a crowd pleaser, so we were surprised when the company announced that its update, the new ZEN, would be flash based.

Creative has in fact abandoned hard drive players altogether, and the new ZEN the company's first shot at a flash based music and video player. In terms of general wow factor or ease of use, it's no iPod touch, but it does have a larger screen than the iPod nano and more features, including an FM radio and a voice recorder.

The 4GB and 8GB ZEN flavors match or beat Apple's prices for those capacities, and the 16GB model costs just $250 or $150 less than the same capacity iPod Touch. (SanDisk beats them all with its new $200 16GB Sansa View). The ZEN also has an SD memory card slot to expand the player's capacity, which iPods lack.

If you're looking for a flash player with decent features, performance, and expandability, give the ZEN a try. It will even play unprotected Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) files from your iTunes library.