Creative Zen Stone 1GB
Page 4
Transferring Files
As mentioned on the previous page, the Zen Stone is a USB Mass Storage Class device, so transferring files to the player is just as you would copy files to a removable drive or USB flash drive.
If you use Media Lite, it is a simple matter of selecting the files or folders you want, and clicking a button. The following screenshot shows file transfer in progress.
Click for larger picture.
Transfer Speeds
To measure the transfer speed of the Zen Stone, we chose 201MB of MP3s.
| Transfer method | Time taken | Average write speed |
| Media Lite | 4:54mins | ~0.68MB/s |
| Windows Media Player 11 | 5:21mins | ~0.63MB/s |
| Windows Explorer | 5:01mins | ~0.67MB/s |
Benchmarks
The following graph shows the result of the benchmarks done using SimpliSoftware's HD Tach.
The benchmark shows an average read speed of 6.0MB/s, and average write speed of 0.9MB/s, confirms the slow transfer speeds observed above.
Battery Life
Creative claims a playback time of 10 hours.
For audio tests, the Zen Stone was set to a volume similar to that of other DAPs used for the tests. Separate tests were performed for the "Repeat All" and "Shuffle" play modes.
A 3.5mm-3.5mm audio cable was used to connect the players to the line-in of a computer, with software recording the audio input. The battery life is considered to be the time from which music starts playing till it stops (when the player switches off due to insufficient power).
Click for larger picture.
When playing MP3s sequentially, the Zen Stone managed 10 hours 45 minutes, nearly an hour more than the advertised 10 hours. Shuffle mode put the player to only about 9 hours, while WMA files resulted in just under 6 hours. This is expected, and has been the case for many other DAPs in our other reviews. Overall, the Zen Stone offers decent battery life for MP3 playback.