I really wanted to like this player. It has very good battery life. It allows you to effortlessly build and save long playlists, and there are loads of play options to choose from. Not only can you select all tracks in a particular genre or by a particular artist, you can use the DJ mode to select a number of tracks based on certain criteria. For example, it will select the tracks that you've played most often, the tracks you haven't played yet, the tracks you've rated the highest, and so on. In addition to this you have various play modes, including play all selected tracks once, repeat all selected tracks, shuffle tracks once, shuffle and repeat tracks.
The built-in sound recorder is fairly decent and came in really useful for interviewing people for a website feature.
It feels quite tough and difficult to break, but it's so slim that it will slip out of your hands a bit too easily. The buttons are far too small. It's easy to press the wrong one by mistake unless you're really careful. Basically the slimness of it and the smallness of the buttons makes it uncomfortable to use unless you have tiny hands with pins for fingers.
When you make major changes to the tracks on the player, it takes ages for it to switch on, and the 'configuring library' screen stays on for a long time. I've had this player suddenly turn itself off, despite the battery being full and the keys being locked. It often starts skipping (like a CD player would if you kept knocking it) on certain albums, so you have to restart it. If you make a playlist more than a couple of albums long, it will take ages to start playing after you press the play button - a 'please wait...' message stays on the screen for far too long.
You can only make playlists on the player - if you create one in Windows Media player for example, the player will not play it. There doesn't seem to be any way of creating one on the Creative software either. It would be a lot easier if you could just drag and drop whatever tracks you want onto a playlist on your computer, rather than going through all the tracks on the player.
All in all I was fairly happy with this player but let down by the annoying skipping (which goes away after a restart) and the extreme slowness when trying to play long playlists.