Creative Zen Stone 1GB
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Navigation System
The navigation system on the Zen Stone is straight-forward enough. What is interesting is the mode switch.
By pushing and releasing the switch to the "Skip folder" function, the Zen Stone skips the current folder. For example, if you categorised your music by album, you could skip the current album. Or if you categorised by genre, then you could easily skip the current genre. Do note that the Zen Stone has a limitation of playing music up to three folders deep, and a maximum of 100 folders and 1000 tracks. These are pretty reasonable limitations, but they are limitations nonetheless.
Other than that, the Zen Stone does pretty much what you would expect a screen-less DAP to do. One issue we found was that the volume stepping was not gradual enough. The jump from the lowest volume (i.e., no sound) to the next level was very sudden, and this might be a problem if you prefer to listen to your music at lower volumes.
Software
Creative states that the Zen Stone requires Windows XP (SP1) or Windows Vista. However, the Zen Stone is actually a USB Mass Storage Class Device, and so it can be used with many other operating systems, including Windows 2000, Mac OS, and even Linux (we tested on Fedora Core to be sure). Creative offers the Media Lite software, which can be downloaded for free, to manage the Zen Stone. If you have WMA DRM (Digital Rights Management) files, then you will need either the Media Lite software or Windows Media Player (at least version 9).
Our copy of Media Lite was provided to us on a CD-R, although the downloaded version should be identical.
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Media Lite offers the functionality to manage the Zen Stone. The two key features are CD ripping, and transfer music and data to and from the Zen Stone.
In addition, Media Lite allows updating of the Zen Stone firmware, though it should be noted that this is actually via a built-in Internet browser, so you can perform the same firmware update without Media Lite.
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This firmware update dialog (left) looks just like the one used for the M-Cody M-20 (right), which leads us to believe this is probably a generic firmware updater.
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The actual update was rather fast.
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Though we were surprised at the prompt to restart the computer.
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We clicked on "No", and got another reminder to restart.
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Media Lite also allows setting of volume restriction. Presumbly, this feature would be used by concerned parents to protect their child's hearing.
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