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Creative’s Zen X-Fi 2 bears more than a passing resemblance to the iPod Touch with its metal back and large touchscreen, but is designed to be held horizontally instead of vertically. Unfortunately, the touchscreen is extremely aggravating to use. It’s quite sensitive but also very inaccurate, making it far too easy to choose the wrong song or menu option. The only way to compensate for this is to apply very firm, constant pressure instead of a light touch, which makes it a pain to use. The included noise-isolation earphones are surprisingly good. The noise isolation isn’t as effective as from some third-party sets, but it works well in most noisy environments. Vocals sound clear and there’s a fair amount of bass, but the high end can be harsh and jazz and blues tracks are muffled. These faults mostly disappeared when we used a high-quality set of earphones, but bass still wasn’t as deep as we would have liked. An onscreen button gives quick access to options such as the equaliser. Surprisingly, this model lacks built-in wireless networking, so it can’t be used to listen to music stored on a UPnP media server like its predecessor. The first model had an SD card slot for storing more music and copying photos off the card, but this model accepts only the smaller and less commonly used MicroSD cards. We had trouble getting static-free reception on the built-in FM radio, but when we did, the audio quality was clear. One area in which the Zen X-Fi has improved over its predecessor is battery life. It lasted nearly 28-and-a-half hours when playing music – which is more than twice that of the previous model – and nearly six hours when playing videos, which is also a slight improvement over the first model. Video is very bright with plenty of contrast on the 3in screen. The Zen can’t play H.264 files, but it had no problem playing DivX and XviD videos.
There’s a lot to like about the Zen X-Fi 2, from its good audio quality to its long battery life, but its infuriating touchscreen heavily counts against it. Philips’ GoGear Muse 16GB is a better choice.
