Verdict: Microsoft ups the stakes against Apple's iPod
The sad demise of the Sega Dreamcast might seem irrelevant now, but the reason for its death is one that all technology companies should be mindful of. The Dreamcast died because gamers were waiting for the PlayStation 2 to arrive, seduced by Sony's promises of what the 'Emotion Engine' would deliver. Microsoft's Portable Media Center, a new portable digital audio, video and image player, may well fall victim to the same deadly expectancy. PMCs are good but you can't help yourself imagining what might still be to come.
As with PCs, Microsoft isn't making PMC hardware, although the company has defined a hardware specification. The Zen features a 20GB hard drive and a 3.8in LCD screen, with a resolution of 320 x 240. It's controlled using two clusters of buttons; the buttons on the right-hand side are playback controls, while the left-hand side buttons handle navigation. Along the top are four instant shortcut buttons that can be assigned to files and playlists.
And that's it for Creative's involvement - everything else comes from Microsoft. Windows Portable Media Center Edition is based on Windows CE, so boot-up is instantaneous. The green Windows button is equivalent to XP's 'Start' button, and it brings up a menu familiar to anyone who's used the full-size Windows Media Center Edition (see Issue 3, p36). It presents 'My TV', 'My Music', 'My Pictures', 'My Videos' and 'Settings' as options. You can then mooch through menus, and use the back button to retrace your steps. It's a very smooth OS, although it's more involved and slower than the iPod's music only menu system.
As an audio player, the Zen has strengths and weaknesses in equal measure. Sound quality is brilliant - strong, expansive and clear. It can sort songs by album, artist, genre and new additions, and supports Windows Media Player 10 playlists.
The navigation buttons are reasonably effective. But even though the Zen has a huge screen, it only displays album art; disappointingly, there are no playback visualisations. The Zen's main problem as a music player is its size, and here is where you start dreaming of the next generation. It weighs over twice as much as the iPod and you know in a year's time there will be much lighter PMCs around.
Picture playback is inconsequential. Modern digital cameras take pictures at high resolutions and their large photos take time to scale down to fit the screen. There's a TV output port for viewing them on a decent-sized screen, but frustratingly, there are no AV inputs at all.
The only way to get TV content onto the Zen is to record it on a Media Center PC and then upload it. The same is true for video and audio files: despite the Zen's size it doesn't have any direct recording and encoding abilities. Again, these are features you can easily imagine coming in a subsequent generation product.
Video playback is smooth. The screen lacks the brightness and sharpness of modern PDAs, but while it's a little dark and dingy, watching movies on the move is an excellent way to pass time when travelling. The concept feels less revolutionary than mobile music, as it demands your full attention, so is unlikely to become as pervasive.
Windows Media Player 10 automatically converts videos so they fit the PMC's screen when you upload them - sometimes. At other times, videos that play perfectly well in Media Player 10 will appear on the Zen in name only, refusing to play. The problem is that there is a wide variety of different video codecs and the Zen doesn't support them all. Worse, there's no way of telling if a video will work or not until you try and play it. It's annoying, but not as much as perhaps the Zen's most fundamental problem.
MP3 players enables users to take their entire existing music collection with them, because it's easy to rip MP3s from CDs. Ripping videos from DVDs is harder and more laborious. The DVD format's misconceived DRM scheme means that Microsoft and the entertainment industry essentially expect users to buy movies again to play on PMCs such as the Zen. This just seems unfairly restrictive to us.
CONCLUSION
The Zen has its moments, and is a reasonable mobile video player with excellent sound quality and battery life. However, the screen is disappointing, it's more costly than an MP3 player, and is big and chunky.
These issues will be worked out, although the problem with getting video onto the Zen seems to go beyond teething troubles. It's an unresolved conflict between hardware companies' attempts to give us more than music on the move, and the entertainment industry's desire to make us pay over and over for the same media.
