Also hidden away here, next to the USB port is a mono microphone that you’d completely miss if it wasn’t for the small microphone logo next to it.Īround the back is a removable Li-ion battery, which means that you can have a second battery at hand if the stated 12 hour battery life isn’t enough for you. There are a few more features worth pointing out and all of these bar one are located at the top of the Zen Micro – the power button, which acts as a key lock switch if you move it to the right instead of the left, the headphone socket and the mini USB 2.0 port. This button brings up a small menu, just like the one on a Windows keyboard, but in this case it is much more useful since it gives you access to a wide range of settings, but more on that latter. It works pretty much like a laptop touchpad and you tap it just like a touchpad to make selections.Īpart from the scroll part of the controls there are five more sections to the touch pad, a play/pause button, a skip forward/fast forward button and the same for reverse, a button labelled back and one that looks like that button on your Windows keyboard that you hardly ever use. It doesn’t have a wheel though, instead it Creative has implemented a far simpler up/down scroll pad, similar to that seen on some laptops. Creative however, claims that it has the lion’s share of the drives that Seagate makes.Īlthough the Zen Micro isn’t the first and undoubtedly not the last music device to feature a hard drive as it storage medium, it is the first pocket friendly unit with touch sensitive controls that hasn’t been manufactured by Apple. Seagate is the first company to produce a 5GB 1in drive and it seems to be appearing in all kinds of MP3 players from a wide range of manufacturers. The latest device to feature a 1in hard drive (although manufactured by Seagate instead of IBM), is the Zen Micro MP3 player from Creative Labs. The MicroDrive concept has been taken onboard by other hard drive manufacturers and 1in hard drives are moving into areas that I doubt even IBM foresaw. With the introduction of the MicroDrive IBM started a revolution in personal entertainment, but I don’t think that it ever realised the effect that its tiny hard drive was going to have on the world.
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