What I hate about the Zen Vision:M

Last year I was fortunate enough to win a 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M on TechEd at Barcelona. I was very excited with the video and capacity advantages over my good old 1GB Muvo. But for strange as it may seem, my usage experience was significantly worse. Let me tell you why.

Let's start with my usage. I use it for audio books and podcasts. Mainly podcasts.

So what's wrong about Zen Vision:M?

• I cannot navigate by directory, so I have to rely on the providers categorization; and by god, they are not coherent, event from episode to episode on the same podcast. The worst case is Hanselminutes, which I cannot find neither by Album nor by Autor, making me choose by track - over a 30GB catalog!;
• I cannot delete the current playing track - this is crucial for managing podcasts;
• I cannot ear the podcast when playing forward - this is a great way to skip advertisement;
• when I shutdown the device, the track will resume where it stop, as expected; but only for a couple of hours, if the device is kept disconnected for over 3-4 hours, the track is resumed from the start; this strange feature doesn't happen on the Videos;
• the device is too heavy and clumsy to carry with you daily; it is, however, very well built;
• the control cannot be "blindly" operated from the pocket - the Muvo can;

So the verdict is: Vision:M was not built to podcasts. It is great to play music, and just awesome to play video, but apart from the 30GB capacity, the Muvo is unbeatable.