Impressive, well-rounded package with a beautiful screen

I was also considering the Vision, but thought it was a little too big and I'd heard bad things about the screen's viewing angle (especially from the left side...weird). My first impression of the Vision:M was that it is smaller than I expected it would be when I ordered it, but still a little bigger than I would have liked. This is not to say that it's too big. It fits nicely in the hand, but it could have been made thinner. That being said, it seems to be tightly built and durable.

Startup time depends on how long the player has been off. I guess when it "cold boots" it takes about 15 seconds, but when it's ready to go, which is most of the time, it starts up in about two seconds to where you were before you shut it off. I really like its responsiveness. There is a slight delay in playing and stopping videos but it's reasonable.

Also on the topic of power and all that, if you don't turn on the lock switch while playing music, the screen will dim but will never shut off, wasting power. If the lock switch is on, the screen will dim, then shut off after a short time, which can be set in the system menu. Obviously, the screen never shuts off while playing video regardless of the lock switch's position. I haven't actually measured battery life but it's certainly enough to keep me going during a typical day with plenty left over. I've also watched all of Memoirs Of A Geisha (2.5 hrs) on it and the battery meter was still a third of the way full, so that was impressive. I'm going to be going on a 15-hour flight next month so I'll be able to put it to the test then...

For the most part, I like the controls. The four main buttons are not touch-sensitive as I first thought they might be when I saw pictures of the Vision:M. They are pressure buttons, as are the forward/back buttons. The whole border of the touch pad is the forward/back rocker button: when you push the left side you're pushing the back button and vice versa. The touch pad annoys me because it's too sensitive, even when it's set to the minimum sensitivity in the settings. I keep accidentally opening folders and playing videos and songs instead of scrolling. I may get better with time but so far I don't like it. At the same time though, I like the idea of tapping the pad to select. It's very convenient, like using a laptop touch pad. So if the touch pad were just less sensitive it might have been pleasant.

The user interface, by contrast, is great and very intuitive. I especially like the Back and Shortcut buttons. The Back button will not always just move up one menu level, it will work more like the Back button in a web browser. This is especially useful because there are different ways to get to various menus and screens and you sometimes want to backtrack the same way you came. Here's a nice gem: holding down the back button for a second will return you to the very top main menu. The Shortcut button can be programmed to perform any menu function or open any menu. For example, you can set it to start microphone recording at any time to make voice notes, or you can have it take you directly to your now playing list.

You can configure the main menu contents. You can choose what items will or will not appear on the menu. You can't, however, remove the System menu, and for good reason too. You can also have some of the items in lower menus appear on the main menu, such as "Playlists".

The context menu button is useful. The options range from common tasks like playing, deleting, skipping, rating, and so on, to taking you to system option screens like video settings and audio settings and the like.

The sound is, actually, something to write home about, and I don't usually write home. The Vision:M sounds fantastic. At high volume, even with the little earphones, there is no distortion despite it being very loud indeed. With external speakers or a great pair of headphones, it becomes truly impressive and I have to congratulate Creative on the progress they've made since the early days of Nomad. There are, refreshingly, some usable equalizer settings as well in addition to a custom 5-band graphic EQ (and no more of that EAX nonsense from the Nomad).

I've never understood the advantage of having photo functionality in a media player, but it's there and it's not bad. One thing that I'll concede as being kind of cool is the slideshow feature, where you can play a playlist while viewing a slideshow. Larger pictures take a second to load, but they look vibrant and bright. I only have a handful of pictures on it and don't really look at them at all. A waste of space, come to think of it.

You can load podcasts onto it either manually (as mp3s) or you can use Creative's Sync Manager, which is a very useful and well-designed program. It will search the areas you ask it to for media and sync up with the player. It also syncs your organizer data with Outlook or other programs, and podcasts you subscribe to in ZenCast Organizer (a neat little utility). The problem with all this is that when you sync automatically, podcasts are converted into AVIs before they're put on the Vision:M. This not only takes more space, but also uses up more battery life with playback. The upside to all this is that these AVIs become like powerpoint presentations of the podcasts so they're not totally useless. I suppose they're trying to keep in mind that you may be subscribing to video podcasts as well and want to keep all your subscriptions in one place on the player. I see the point to all that, but I still think the software should give me the option of saving them as mp3s or as AVIs, especially since AVI conversion takes quite a bit longer than just transferring mp3s over USB 2.0.

Speaking of connectivity, connecting the Vision:M to a computer is totally painless and can happen in two ways. You can connect it as an external drive, which takes advantage of a partition you set aside for that purpose (up to 16 GB). In this way, the device can connect to any computer (including Macintosh) to be used as an external HD.

The second way to connect it is as a media player for adding and organizing media. You don't need any special software for this. You can browse and add files through the Windows explorer. You just plug it in, Windows detects it, and next thing you know you can see the folder structure on the device and you can drag and drop media files into it. It won't let you drop in files that are not compatible (that is, you can't use the media portion as an external HD). One really cool thing that I really love about this player is that you can also copy files off of it as well. You couldn't do that with older Creative players (eg, my old Nomad Jukebox) or other players in general if I'm not mistaken.

Creative has also included some good software if you don't want to use Windows explorer or Windows Media Player (which also works well with the player). Media Explorer and MediaSource are the two main components of the bundle. Media Explorer is good for adding files, adding album art, and converting incompatible files to make them compatible with the player. This last function is the most useful for me, especially for some videos. MediaSource is great for organizing media on a large scale, such as fixing mp3 tags in big groups of files and for making playlists.

Speaking of tags, the player doesn't care about where audio files are in the directory structure. It will organize them based on tags in the player's interface. So you could have all your music organized into directories and that directory structure will be preserved on the device's HD, but when you browse files on the player itself without a computer, all you will see are files organized into artist, album, and genre tag fields. I'm not too crazy about that. At least the player doesn't tamper with the actual file names or directories on the HD, which is good. Media Explorer has a tool that will try to look up your songs and fill in missing tag information from the web.

Video playback is crisp and bright. The screen is small, though, too small to show widescreen movies without cropping them, so I recommend allowing the software to crop widescreen formats before transferring to the player. If you don't, you can stretch the video if you make it "fit to screen" in the context menu. Video output to TV is wonderful, but you have to either buy their proprietary A/V cable ($20!) or fiddle with a normal one; you have to switch two of the jack contacts...look it up and you'll find it. An unnecessary move on Creative's part.

Speaking of unnecessary, the dock is a little white plastic receptacle for my unbridled fury. It is silly and I don't understand why they resorted to it. Instead of wasting effort on that proprietary connector they could have included the three jacks (A/V out, power, and USB) on the player itself like in the Vision. I'm baffled and will say no more about it except to say that it royally sucks. Oh yes, I also think that not having a removable battery is annoying at first, until you consider that the life of the device is probably just about the same as the life of a battery. However, should something go wrong with the battery, you're in the same boat as iPod users, which is an unenviable and leaky boat indeed. I'm going to take good care of the battery and cross my fingers.

Then there are some miscellaneous features like an FM tuner with a recording feature, as well as an internal microphone. While recording, you can split recordings into tracks. There are also a calendar, task list, contact list, and alarm that all sync with Outlook.

I like that Creative includes the power supply, a pouch, and some decent earphones. They're decent, not great.

In all, a great player with which I'm very happy.