A direct competitor to the iPod Shuffle, the Creative Zen Stone is also a miniature screenless music player.  It has a storage capacity of 1 or 2 GB, weight of 17g and dimensions of  53.7 x 35.3 x 12.8 mm.  Such a small size means it can easily fit into a pocket, pouch or on a keychain (an accessory offered by Creative). 

The Zen Stone’s design is attractive and discreet.  However, once in hand our first impression wasn’t overwhelming.  The plastic is subject to finger smudges and scratching.  Also, the extreme lightness reminds us of a cheap toy or maybe suggests that the Zen Stone could have been miniaturized even more.

After this, there was a nice surprise when we connected it to a PC via a USB2 port: the player is recognized as a storage device!  In other words, is can be used as a USB key and all you have to do is drag and drop files in a window for transfer.  The bad surprise was that we measured an average speed of 0.8 Mo/s and this was the slowest of all products in our survey.

The Shuffle or Zen Stone?

As with both devices, the absence of a screen makes navigation particulièry difficult especially when the capacity is 1 or even 2 GB. It’s therefore impossible to find a particular track amongst the 500 or 1000 files.  The Shuffle’s clip is a small accessoiry which lacks on the Zen Stone; however, this can be quickly remedied with one of the numerous optional accessories. Both players are small (although the Shuffle is more compact), easy to carry, discreet, and réactive to your every touch.


So how about sound quality? We had our suspicions and it is indeed not the best.  Changing headphones is obligatory.  Once this is done audio quality lacks a bit of precision, the Shuffle also being very mediocre in this domain.  However, overall the Zen Stone’s sound level is superior.

In the end, choosing the Zen Stone over the iPod Shuffle will be a question of design as well as practicality; the fact that the former is recognized as an external hard drive significantly improves the ease of file transfer.  And finally, its recommended retail price of 30 euros (an important factor for this type of product) places it ahead of the Shuffle.