Creative Zen Style M100 4GB Touch MP3 Player - Black

I have had my Zen Style M100 for one week. I purchased it solely for listening to audio books and tunes when I go on holiday. It is smaller than I expected, and a nice compact item, with touch screen controls, but Creative could have supplied decent earphones with this product. You will not be happy with the 'phones supplied. However. if you listen through a half a decent set, you should be very pleased. Having said that, there are a number of things that Creative should try remedy.

First: the earphones - they really are rubbish.

Second: The instructions supplied, are insufficient, and are printed on a folded sheet of paper. Of course, you can download information from the manufacturers website, but they are still not sufficient.

Third: The sequencer is very limited. I use the "rock" setting, which is acceptable to me. There are no seperate bass or treble settings.

Fourth: Video and photo programs are poor.

Fifth: Inserting a MicroDs card, and extracting it, is extremely fiddly, to say the least. I have had to use a pin or ballpen to undertake what should be very simple tasks!

Sixth: The usb lead supplied is rediculously short, about three inches long. One of the shortest I have come across!

My M100 appears to have a problem with Sandisk DShc cards. When placed into the card slot it causes the player to "lock", rebooting and removal of the card has to be undertaken to get my player working again. The card works as it should in my PC, and the MP3 player works fine with a Transend MicrSDHC card.

I have not had problems transfering information over to the player, only playing the recordings with the Scandisk card, as explained above. I should also mention that when you wish to access the card, you have to wait some time for the card to be read, especially if there are a lot of recordings on it. I have two 4Gb MicroDShc cards and have not used a higher capicity or faster card. So my comments are on 4gb cards which are speed type 4.

There also seems to be a problem with deleting recordings. Sometimes it works, other times the information remains on the player, but I will be checking this with Creative, who perhaps have a software update.

I have not used the video or photo programs, as having looked at the demos provided on the M100 (which I assume were high quality ones) the picture apprears a bit blurry, and poor quality. I will not be using these functions because of this.

Despite everything, I do like this compact player, It's easy to use (once you get the hang of the various functions) and it will serve my purpose. Once the Scandisk problem is "sorted", I will be even happier!

Not impressed. Updated to latest firmware 8/11 and still has problems detecting the Sandisk micro SD card I added. Sometimes hangs when I tried to access the extra storage and sometimes doesn't detect it at all. Device itself is not as slim as I imagined and the volume does'nt go very high. so I returned for a refund. Shame because the previous player Creative made was great (Creative zen V Plus)

I've had this player for 2 weeks now and not been able to use it properly once. The player will sync with winamp and windows media player, but will not transfer over playlists. To do this you need to export them yourself (using some third party software I was recommended by creative but not made by them) reformat the player and drag and drop both lists and music, or so customer service told me

Except... the player can't seem to process a playlist longer that 10 songs... this issue is still not resolved for me and if I was a computer novice I would be utterly confused by some of the things I have been asked to do to try and fix my player

For a player that is marketed as "simple plug and play" this is very far from my experience.

The player itself looks nice and the touch screen works well.

Another gripe however is that the upgradable memory is not integrated into the player. It is a separate memory store. If you want to store music on it then you will not be able to load playlists etc onto it, the player will just play them in order.

The creative forums suggest using the SD memory for movies. With such a small player and limited battery life I really don't see the point in this. Also the 32gig chip I put in mine never worked (though it did in my computer) the player seemed to have huge problems processing the songs I put on it (even though I only filled up 10% of the chip) Normally the battery would run out before I even got a file list of what was on my player.

Obviously this is only one player, many people may be perfectly happy with theirs but I certainly will not be buying from creative again.

On the up side, the customer service people contacted me within 3 days of my complaint and have tried hard to resolve the issues with my player.