Battery Life

Ahh... The all important question - how's the battery life?

Of course, with its smaller battery, the Zen Vision will only have an unspectacular battery life, unlike the exceptionally long battery life of the Zen PMC. Still, I ran a little test of its battery life.

With its screen brightness and speaker volume turned up to 100%, the Zen Vision managed to play a 1054kbps, 640x316 video for 2 hours and 50 minutes. When I switched the screen brightness and plugged in the earphones (at 50% volume), the Zen Vision ran for almost an hour longer at 3 hours and 46 minutes.

That's a far cry from the battery life of the Zen PMC. But then again, the Zen PMC has twice the battery capacity of the Zen Vision. In addition, the Zen Vision's LCD screen has a much brighter backlight. In fact, in a normally lit room, you should be able to get by with the screen brightness set to 30%.

The standard battery is removable, so you can actually buy additional batteries and swap them in when your battery runs out. Creative also sells an extended-capacity battery which seems to have double the capacity of the stock battery.

However, neither extra batteries nor the extended-capacity battery is of much use because it's so damn HARD to remove the battery! I thought I would either break my finger nail or the device itself when I tried to take the battery out. Maybe I'm doing it the wrong way but then again, Creative never provided instructions on how we should remove the battery.

The biggest problem encountered when removing the battery is the battery release button. When you press on it, it's supposed to retract the hook holding the battery. Unfortunately, pressing the battery release button did not fully retract the hook. Therefore, you will have to push and nudge it until the battery pops out.

This wouldn't be a big problem since most users would probably never change the battery. But what would make removing a battery necessary for these users would be the fact that the Zen Vision has no reset button! So, if there's a critical software failure, the only way to recover from that is to take out the battery which as mentioned is a PITA!

What's In The Box?

First of all, let's start with what's not in the box. Creative chose to make the CompactFlash Memory Card Reader an optional accessory. So, you either have to buy the overpriced Creative card reader, or find a cheaper generic CompactFlash memory card reader.

I had to settle for an overpriced Archos card reader from the shop I purchased the Zen Vision, since I couldn't find it anywhere else. When I come to think of it, I haven't really seen many CompactFlash memory card readers in the market...

Other than the Zen Vision itself, the box contains a pair of earphones, an AV cable that allows you to connect the Zen Vision to the TV, a standard A-to-Mini-A USB cable, an AC/DC adaptor and a cloth pouch to hold the Zen Vision.

The pouch is a puzzling addition. Why the heck did Creative include an unpadded cloth pouch to hold something with such a big screen? It gives the Zen Vision absolutely no shock protection. Nor is the large LCD panel protected against direct trauma.

Creative should have provided a slip case with a padded front so that there's SOME protection. That wouldn't have cost them much more than the pathetic cloth pouch. Why skimp on something as important as protection for the Zen Vision?

Other than that, you have the usual manuals and driver CD. It also comes with a demo version of Diversified Multimedia's Video Vault PVR which appears to be just another video converter, so I didn't bother checking it out.

On the topic of manuals, I realized something that I wouldn't have noticed if I wasn't writing a review. Creative's manual isn't really very helpful at all. There isn't enough screenshots of the UI to guide the user.

IMHO, the manual should have enough pictures to guide the user through the steps, instead of relying on pure text like "To access this feature, select menu a->menu b->item c".