Creative Zen V 1GB
4 minutes read •
The honeymoon
The Creative Zen V was my first Portable Media Player. I received the white and orange Zen V as a christmas present. Ahh the memories! I had a good 30+ minute commute in the school bus so this would become really handy! The Zen V lineup was composed of two variants, the V and the V+. The V+ had black shell, while the V had the white one. It was not the only difference of course, the V+ had FM radio and the possibility to playback videos. Video on a tiny, low-resolution, 1:1 OLED screen, what a pleasant experience. The Zen V had a nice shape in hand, being really compact with no hard edges. It reminded me of an egg 🥚. The sound quality was good too, with plenty of power for bass. The supported formats were poor, of course at the time it was pretty much the norm, having only support for MP3 and WMA. This PMP had a particularity, it was able to record from a built-in microphone or a built-in line-in jack! That was a rare feature at the time. Feature or gimmick, I'm not really sure but I don't recall ever using this functionality. What I recall however, is setting the main language to Japanese (I was really into learning Japanese during high school) and roll with it.The Decline
After a couple of years, I outgrew the small 1gb of capacity, and started to feel constrained. Choosing music to put on was a conscious decision and it was not a fun one (to me, at that time). My fun was to really play all songs random, and having to choose what songs goes it really limited this. It ended up being a secondary (backup) MP3 player to my main one (the Microsoft Zune). Going outdoor, going on the beach, this was a duty for the Zen. Remember I mentioned an OLED screen? Yeahhh…. Those early OLED screen had plenty of issues. One of them was the burn-in issue, just like old CRTs of the time. If an display stayed on the screen for too long, it would end up being permanently being printed on the screen, like some sort of ghost. You know what kind of device displays always the same thing? You guest right! An MP3 player! The top layer saying “Now playing”, the square where the album art was printed, the progress bar, the battery status, all those things were almost engraved in the screen. What an idea to put that kind of screen on such a device. The blacks were truly black! And the battery life was probably better with an OLED screen. The other issue.. well it’s a fatal flaw, one that sealed the deal of this little egg. The display would lose brightness over the years. To a point where the screen became all black all the time. Not really easy to operate such device with no display! Because of that, I ended up thrashing the Creative Zen V :(. It went to an electronic recycler, I didn’t put the device in the actual trash.
This is a tribute to a small, wonderful device that was the white-and-orange Creative Zen V! Rest in peace, you served me well over all those years.
Pro tip
Since the Zen V had a perfectly square screen, you can rotate its UI. It is a way nicer device to use on the side. That's how I was using mine, with controls on the right side.