Creative Travelsound Zen Stone White

The first thing to strike me about the Creative Travelsound was how attractive, chunky and apparently well made it is, a relief considering the price, which was getting on for as much as that paid for the compatible Stone Plus player.

The unit has a neat little stand and its own power switch, allowing the speakers to be used either actively with the supplied AAA batteries or passively via the MP3 player itself (which is not recommended as this drains the player's own battery unnecessarily).

The sound quality is fine to my untrained ear although, obviously, much depends on the bitrate at which the player's tracks were themselves recorded.

One thing I find strange is that when the MP3 player is docked into the speakers (through the very solid jack connexion and rubber grips), it is impossible to access its own power switch, which also doubles up as the pause button, and this can be something of a nuisance.

Overall, though, this quirk aside, I am so far very pleased with this mini speaker system.

This thing is a real pile of junk. I bought it for my daughter expecting it to be useful in playing music to help her sleep. However, there is no capability to plug the speaker direct into the mains which makes it fairly useless. When you plug the MP3 player direct into the mains you can no longer stand up the speaker. Oh - and it's also fairly senseless that you can't turn the MP3 player on whilst it is docked. All in all, a real waste of money and I'd suggest you pay more to get something better.

My daughter ripped this open with her Zen Stone plus for christmas, only to find it didn't fit. Apparently the Zen Stone plus with speaker is a different model to the Zen Stone plus....that is not clear at all, nor is the fact that the latter will not fit since the speaker means the case is fatter.