Last month saw the arrival of Apple’s latest iPods. But while the iPod Touch is arguably in a league of its own, we weren’t quite so bowled over by the new iPod Nano — its squat figure divided opinion in the Mobile office and the larger fingered members of the team just weren’t sure what to make of the shrunken scroll wheel. It wasn’t all bad, but compared to the Touch, is distinctly underwhelming, and now Creative’s new Zen is here, it's got some serious competition.

The Zen is a touch larger than the Nano, but only just, and its credit card-sized fascia still fits neatly in the hand. Look around its slim, smoothly curved edges and you’ll find a standard mini USB connector for hooking it up to your PC and, something sorely lacking from the Nano, an SDHC card slot for adding extra storage.

It lands another body blow to Apple’s pint-sized player with its larger 2.5” screen. Like the Nano, the Zen also has video playback capabilities, but where the Nano’s 2” screen sent us cross-eyed after a few minutes, the Zen’s extra half inch makes all the difference. The screen has a 320 x 240 pixel resolution and image quality is superb.

Colours are vibrant and motion nice and smooth thanks to the 30fps playback. WMV, Xvid and DivX files are all supported, but only if they’re 320 x 240 resolution files, so you’ll have to re-encode higher resolution files using the supplied conversion software if you want to watch them.

Creative’s Zen also boasts an FM tuner, voice recording with the built-in microphone and drag-and-drop file transfer. The only areas in which the Nano remains victorious are its slick touchwheel interface and seamless integration with iTunes, but it’s just not enough to win out overall.

Creative’s new player looks good, sounds good, offers loads more features and is a few quid cheaper than Apple’s Nano too, and that’s more than enough to make it a perfect stocking filler.

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