Creative's Zen X-Fi: An All-Around Star

CREATIVE'S ZEN X-Fi is a tremendous digital music player, offering more out-of-the-box features than Apple's recently revamped iPods. The X-Fi has great sound, superb headphones, expandable storage via SD card, and the ability to stream and download music from your PC wirelessly. It looks great, too.




Its features differentiate this player from the competition. Not only can you download music, video, and images wirelessly to the device, but you can also stream media from your PC, from Creative's server (which offer podcasts and free music), or from a computer that's running on an open network.

Creative's heralded X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity Audio playback deserves much of the credit for this player's amazing sound. It delivered deep, clean, well-defined audio.

As much as I found to like about the X-Fi, it does have some limitations. It doesn't work with Mac OS X (only with Xp and Vista); its online chat application doesn't work well; and you won't get the same degree of integration with third-party speaker systems, car stereos and accessories that you would with the ubiquitous iPod.




The masses may continue to think iPod first when they need a new MP3 player. But check out the X-Fi, too: It might be the most innovative, feature-packed player on the marked, and it's an absolute steal for the price. Tim Moynihan

PC World November 2008