In the mood of writing reviews recently I decided to review one of my small gadgets called Creative Zen Stone. As you can see from the images above it’s a simple no display MP3 player. Some time ago I was looking for a temporary cheap MP3 because my other one died. I planned to replace it later with Creative Zen or iPod nano, but I dropped that plan, cause I now have my Nokia which plays video too. So back then I found Zen Stone.

I ordered black Stone with 1GB of storage. There’s also Stone Plus with LCD screen available, but I decided that I don’t really need the screen for my daily podcast listening. I also ordered a keychain for my Stone and I find it to be really useful. It’s almost a must have addon for Zen Stone.

Stone feels like a very light stone, it weights almost nothing. I personally think that it looks great. Plain black finish, five buttons in the front side, shuffle/repeat/next folder slider and audio input on top and USB jack in the bottom. Controls are easy to use even when the player is in the pocket. Only thing that bothers me is that when you’re using the keychain (which is made of leather and feels quite solid) the slider is covered by the keychain and you simply can’t use it (I would like to use the skip folder option while wearing the player on my belt with keychain). Other than that, using the player is simple and easy.

Stone connects to computer as a regular USB storage drive, which makes it easy to drag and drop files into folders. Also it means that Stone works very well under Linux, OSX and on other platform, because it doesn’t need any additional software (like iPOD does).

Battery life is rated to 10 hours which is reasonable for player that size. Newer versions of Stone which come with built in speaker (don’t expect much from it though) are rated for 20 hours of battery life. So even though I don’t think that built in speaker is a big feature, still you should go with newer version for extra battery life.

Default headphones are quite reasonable (but not good) for the price range and I actually still use them as my main headphones. With that I think there’s not much more to say about stone.

The verdict is if you’re looking for a cheap simple MP3 player, Zen Stone is a good pick.