REVIEWS / PMPS / CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY

Creative ZEN Style M300 MP3 Player

18 Jul, 2011, 11:01 am IST | by Roydon Cerejo | PMPs PMPs

Choose from a variety of colors

Choose from a variety of colors
Small and compact
Standard set of connectors
About the size of a match-box
Menu is easy to navigate
No option to rate the songs
Not really designed for photos or video
Easy to carry
Expandable memory up to 32GB

creative-zen-style-m300-mp3-player

PRICE IN INDIA

3,488
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TECH2 RATING

6.0

AVERAGE USER RATING

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CONTACT

Creative Technology

 india_getcreativek@ctl.creative.com

 +91 9223 101322

 in.creative.com

Entry level MP3 players are facing a slow death and may very soon cease to exist. This is due to the fact that almost all mobiles phones nowadays support music playback and even have expandable memory so it doesn't really make sense to invest in another gadget as it’s just one extra thing to carry around. Now unless these budget MP3 players have something unique to offer, it may be worth considering. Creative is no newbie when it comes to multimedia products. Their new ZEN Style M300 Bluetooth enabled MP3 player recently launched made it into our labs. Let’s see if it has what it takes to warrant a purchase.

Design and Build Quality
Taking it out of its packaging, you’ll notice that it’s incredibly lightweight and compact, about the size of a match box. The M300 has a glossy back finish around the edges, which tends to attract a lot of fingerprints. The plastic covering for the 1.45-inch TFT display gets greasy quite easily, as well. There are four touch sensitive backlit buttons around the screen that serve as navigation and playback functions. An ‘Option’ button is placed at the bottom .

About the size of a match-box

About the size of a match-box

 

 

The power and lock switch is on the top while the micro-SD card slot (up to 32GB) is placed on the left. The right side is host to the volume toggle switch, while the 3.5mm earphone jack, mini-USB port and reset button are placed at the bottom. Overall the build quality is quite sturdy and I didn’t find any signs of low grade plastics used. The screen has a resolution of just 128x128 pixels and although Creative specifies support for video playback, don’t expect too much. We received the 4GB version, but you also get 8GB and 16GB options.

Choose from a variety of colors

Choose from a variety of colors

 

 

To differentiate this from the horde of budget players in the market, Creative has thrown in Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and AVRCP support to stream audio to your Bluetooth headset. The bundle includes a USB cable for transferring data and charging, some reading material and a pair of earphones.

Features
 The player boots up pretty quickly and you're presented with the main menu. You also have a choice for three colors for the menu items. Navigation is pretty straight forward, use the Up/Down buttons for scrolling, hit ‘Play’ button to enter a menu or back button to go one step back. ‘Music’ lets you sort your music by Artist, Genre, Albums, Playlists or All Tracks. ‘DJ’ mode gives you more options for music playback like Album of the Day, Random Play or Most Popular. I didn’t find much use for this mode, since you get similar options like ‘Shuffle’ in the main music mode itself, which serves the same purpose.

Menu is easy to navigate

Menu is easy to navigate

 

 

The M300 also has a built-in FM radio, which automatically saves the available radio stations. Finally, we have a photo viewer and video player. You need to remember that Creative has just added these extra features so it fills up the spec sheet. In reality, the screen resolution is a little too low to view the menu itself, let alone watch a video. The viewing angles are quite bad and the sunlight legibility is questionable.

 Here’s the unfortunate bit, audio codec support is not very appealing. The M300 only supports MP3, WMA and WAV, the last one is only because it records audio in .WAV format and I don’t think many people use WMA, so you’re left with just MP3. It would have been nice had they included FLAC support like Cowon and Philips' players. Videos is an even shorter list, well not even a list, actually. It only supports SMV video format, which honestly I hadn’t heard about till today. You need to download the converter from Creative's website if you plan on watching any videos on it. The same goes with photos - only JPEG format is supported. One nice addition is the support for Audible audio books. The M300 supports Audible Format 4 and AAX. There’s a also a voice recorder built-in.

Tags: PMPs , Creative Technology , Creative Zen Style M300 , MP3 player , Creative M300 review , M300 review , Bluetooth 2.1 , A2DP , MP3 , 3.5mm headphone jack , review , TFT , LCD , FM Radio , USB 2.0

Would you buy it?




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