Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Creative’s ZEN Stone launched a few months ago to worldwide acclaim as
a serious challenger to the Shuffle at half the price – now Creative
adds an OLED and calls is the Stone Plus.
Clearly unable to call their new mp3 player the ‘Creative ZEN Stoned’, Creative have settled on the title ‘ZEN Stone Plus’ instead, to denote that the new model has some cool add-ons over it’s already cool predecessor.
The most noticeable change is the bright and colorful OLED screen, but under the hood are some other significant changes. The ZEN Stone Plus has had its memory capacity doubled to 2GB, giving users enough space to store up to 1000 tracks, depending on the codec, bitrate and audio format used.
In addition, because of the screen, the Stone Plus now features an inbuilt FM radio, with frequencies seen on-screen, a clock, a stopwatch, a voice recorder and on-screen equalizer settings.
The original ZEN Stone retailed for Singapore S$69, or the equivalent of US $45. The ZEN Stone Plus will retail for only S$30 more at S$99, or the equivalent of US $65.
As with the original Stone, the Plus will come in a range of colors with the same smooth stone like design. The colors are in high gloss and are black, white and pink which are available now, while the colors of red, blue and green are due to be coming ‘soon’.
In addition to the silicon skins (at S$25 of US $16 per set of three), an armband option (S$29 or US $18) for those who want to listen to music while working out, and a keychain option with a case for S$25 or US $18, the Stone Plus also comes with a wristband option coming ‘soon’ (S$29, or US $18) which marks the first time an mp3 player has ever been turned into a watch.
The reverse has already happened with Casio’s mp3 watch design and other companies offering analog watches with built-in mp3 players. But those early models had anywhere from 32mb to 256mb of memory – Creative’s Stone Plus holds a much nicer 2GB that makes all the difference.
Creative advises that as with the Stone, the Stone Plus needs no drivers – just drag and drop up to 1000 songs, then choose to play the songs in the order of the file system, or choose ‘random’ to access the shuffle mode. Battery life is 9.5 hours from a single charge of the internal lithium-ion battery.
Creative are finally figuring out how to make better mp3 players that are finally more compelling that some of Apple’s offerings, although Apple certainly have taken things to the next level with the iPhone itself, something that’ll be much harder for Creative to ‘copy’, even though Apple did much of the copying from Creative in the early days.
So… the original Creative ZEN Stone definitely rocked. Now, with the Stone Plus, Creative’s ZEN range rocks even harder – who needs an iPod Shuffle now?
David Bass
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