People wonder why the iPod, in its various forms and incarnations, is so popular. And the reason is, the alternatives just aren't as user friendly.
A couple of months ago I decided that I was tired of pulling my iPod out of its protective sleeve to pop it in another sleeve to take to the gym. I really only listened to a handful of albums - Modest Mouse We Were Dead... , Soul Coughing's Ruby Vroom, a couple of live Jethro Tull performances.... I considered getting an iPod Shuffle, but I'm just not a "shuffle" sort of guy; I'm more of a "play the album as it was originally conceived" sort of guy. I was really worried that, without a screen, I would be blind among my four or five albums, never sure which one I was about to listen to. So I looked around and found a good price and a postive reviews on Creative's Zen Stone +. It was small, it had a screen, had enough memory for me to pop my four or five albums on, and seemed perfect. Additionally, it had an FM radio, voice recorder, and stopwatch functions - things I thought I might use, but not necessities. Got the wristband attachment for it, figuring that would be a little easier to use in the gym than some giant armband thingy, and if I really liked it, I could wear it as a third watch....
Now, don't get me wrong. The sound on the thing is really good. Even through pretty mediocre sports headphones, the sound was surprisingly good, perhaps better than on the iPod. The form factor is nice - small, shaped like a skipping stone or one of those little rocks you get in the faux Buddhist sand gardens (and thus very appropriate). The screen isn't anything to write home about, but it works as a GUI and to let me know what song I'm on. But everything else, while working okay, was sort of a disappointment.
1. It's a little on the large side to wear as a watch; not too too bad, but a little large. But what makes it impractical to use as a watch is the fact that when the Stone+ shuts down - it shuts down. It goes into a "deep sleep," and in order to wake it up, you need to hold the top button down for a small millenium before it switches on - and then it starts playing music, so you have to pause the music. The top button is a sort of rocker switch - hold down on one side and you control the power, the play/pause, and the menu functions, hold down on the other side and you have a programmable hot key - which you can set to display the time. But the thing has to be on and awake for that programmable button to work. Then it shows the time for like 5 seconds before switching to the song display. It will show the song display for 30 seconds, then switch back to the watch face for 30 seconds, then go black; still awake, but black.
2. The controls don't feel intuitive to me. I've used it several times - not steadily, I'll admit - and every time I'm fishing for stuff. I'm turning the volume up when I want to go to the menu, for instance. I have to go to the menu (center button once if the display is dark, then again when the display is on), tab over to Music Options (right on the ring), choose the menu (center button), down through the menu options (either right or down on the ring), center button to select. If I want to choose an album, it goes something like - center button (to turn on the display), center button (to get to the menu), right ring (to move to Music Options), center button (to choose the Music Options menu), center button (to choose Browse Music), down/right ring to navigate through albums (stored as folders), center button to choose the album. I guess this isn't more onerous than iPod controls, but it feels weird - Music Options, "Browse Music" to choose an album? Things are stranger when you need to change the clock, or find an FM station, or want make a recording. Am I pushing the rocker switch on top, or the center button? Additionally, some menus have a "Cancel" option - which takes you all the way back to the song display, for instance. Some don't have any way to back up at all, you just have to wait 10 seconds until the song display takes over. There is no "back" function at all, so once you go down a path, like say the Browse Music, you can't go back, there is no cancel, you must wait 10 seconds to go back to the Song Display and start all over again - unless you choose an album....
3. This is really annoying: there is a noticeable pause between tracks. I have two live JT albums, which should have almost no pause between tracks. More and more modern albums are so thematically composed, that often times songs will bleed seamlessly into one another; I'm listening to the Decemberists Picaresque right now, and it just did it - blending into "On the Bus Mall" as the last chord of "Engine Driver" resonates. We Were Dead... does this as well. But the Stone+ is totally incapable of doing this. I'm not talking a slightly annoying 1 second gap, as you might have on old vinyl when songs were discrete songs. I'm talking an unbelievably long, several second gap - long enough for you to go "WTF is going on? Have I ripped my headphones out? Did the battery die? Did the album end? WTF?" And then the song starts.
4. A really nice feature of the iPod is the music automatically pauses when you rip the headphones out. I'm constantly doing this at the gym: get the cord wrapped around a piece of equipment, pull, and the ear pieces drag out of my ears, the cord rips out.... Or, more gently, in the car with the iPod plugged into the Aux port - you tug the Aux cord out and the iPod stops. Not so with the Stone+. But this goes beyond losing a few seconds of music when you manage to perform a de-earbudding. With the iPod you essentially have an "If I can't hear it, the music is off" attitude - which saves an untold number of battery hours. With the Stone+, you can be listening to some music (to the point the display has gone dark), decide to stop, detach the headphones.... and the display remains dark, but the music keeps playing, eating battery life.
5. The battery life isn't too good in standby mode. This might be a function of the fact that I don't use it all the time. But just about every time I pick it up - the battery is just about dead. I recently had surgery, so didn't go to the gym for like a month, and so didn't have a reason to wear it. It so drained of power that I had to reset it before it would actually take the charge. It was weird. Took three overnight "chargings" for me to figure this out. Not a big thing, I guess, just ... annoying.
6. It's a quibble, and is a problem with the fact that I had the iPod first and encoded all my CDs through iTunes, but in order to get them to play on the Stone+, I need to re-encode all of them first. I need to do the same with the N800. But there is proprietary Creative Zen software that I need to use in order to copy the music over; it doesn't act like a mass storage device that I can drag and drop .mp3 files onto. I haven't yet tried with my DRM free music that I got through eMusic or Amazon to see if that will load without too many hassles.
7. It seems really sensitive. Twice now I've shorted out the thing with static electricity when I pulled my fleece off. Luckily, it's nothing that a reset (via a pinhole in the back) can't take care of. But it's a pinhole, and when you do it at the gym, you usually don't have anything small enough to reset, so no music for you.
In a sense, a lot of these are quibbles, and the constant comparison to the iPod is slightly unfair; the Stone+ is a decent enough machine. And if this was my first DMP, these prolly wouldn't be hang ups. I would be habituated to pausing the music before taking out the headphones, I would have encoded all my music in a more open format, I would be as used to the Creative music manager as I am to iTunes, the navigation would be second nature. But the difference with an iPod is obvious. The iPod just works; I have to work the Stone+.
So all and all, not a bad machine, but not a great machine. I'm going to continue to use it as my gym machine, but it will never be my second choice, let alone first....
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