Creative are the fathers of MP3 and only this week have been celebrating the first MP3 player, this accomplishment was quickly overshadowed by the success of Apples iPod and the man on the street now thinks that Apple brought us MP3 players. So the recent success of the Creative Zen Micro and now the launch of a direct iPod competitor the Zen Sleek marks a full on attack on the iPod dominancy.

First impressions are very good, this is a high quality device with good choice of materials, mixing aluminium and high level plastics giving a very good "in hand feel" and easily as convincing as the latest 4G iPod. Measuring 59 x 101 x 17mm the sleek does live up to its name in pure size and is the right size for most users to slide the dive into a pocket while travelling.

Initially available in 2 sizes the Creative Zen Sleek ships with either a 20gb hard drive or 40gb drive, we've concentrated on the 20gb which is where the most competition exists and the slightly lighter Sleek seems to shape up well against the iPod on basic stats.

20gb should provide enough storage for 10,000 MP3 tracks encoded at 128kbps, the Sleek supports both the popular MP3 format and the windows WMA file type with digital rights management (DRM 9, 10) meaning that users will be able to use online stores like Napster with the player. Creative also support the standard WAV format up to 320kbps but have decided not to offer support for Ogg Vorbis and other emerging formats, which is a shame.

Apart from the very useable Creative navigation systems and folder structure the interface is first class, its similar to the Zen touch with a vertical slider for scrolling down the list of tracks or menu options, but here the Sleek has a range of control buttons in a reverse horseshoe around the pad. The display is good and bright with a backlit blue monochrome LCD measuring 2 inches, its not quite up to the standards of the new iPod's colour screen but as you won't be viewing images its hardly a big loss.

Power is provided from a Lithium Ion battery and can be recharged for either a USB connection with a host PC or via the supplied power adaptor, battery life is key for any player and creative claim the Zen Sleek will manage 16 hours on a full charge with a little use of the backlight.

There are a few extras with the Sleek, for a start there is an FM tuner something that the iPod still lacks, here the full range FM radio can store 32 stations as presets., the radio can also be used as a recording source for the sleek, or you can use the inbuilt microphone for voice capture. Creative have also endowed the Sleek with a equalizer, this isn't a smaller version of Edward Woodward instead its one of those slightly daft, make you music sound like it's in a cave systems. Well its not that bad but with profiles like rock and pop it's a constant source of amusement to us why anyone would use them to change the way the artist recorded their tracks.

Filling up your 20gb (or 40gb) Zen sleek is achieved via the USB 2.0 connection which is very rapid and much improved over the older USB 1.0 connection on older systems, Creative also bundle their Media Source Player software with the Sleek making it easy to rip your own CD's and to manage which media lives on your player.

Overall Creative seem to have produced a player worthy of their own MP3 heritage, it perhaps could have done with a colour screen but its pitched quite squarely at a price bracket with all the big boys, £189 will buy you a Zen Sleek and you will be one of the few who are not slaves to their iPod.

Often being different means making compromises, with the Zen Sleek being different can be both cool and functional and Creative deserve a pat on the back.

Published - 23/07/2005

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