Years ago (it seems anyway) I bought a Creative Zen Xtra as I got a good deal on it. The thing I liked about it was that it had 60 GB hard disk and could do WMA as well as MP3. The advantage of having 60 GB is that all my music is on it. In the past when I was away travelling I would have to decide what cassettes to take or later what CDs. Now I just pick up my Zen and take everything. I do tend to rely on playlists as finding stuff on it is not always that good. You can browse and search but only on bits of information. The one BIG thing that is missing is to view by Album Artist as well as artist as I have a lot of compilation CDs so my artist list is quite long. The recent Media Player 11 does have a view like this although confusingly the call it Artist and do not have an artist view any more.
As for the size and weight it is bigger than all these nano players but does have 60 GB and is a few years old (still has a mono screen). If I am travelling for work I have my laptop so carrying the Zen as well is not that big a jump (plus I have Sennheiser noise cancelling headphones which are reasonably big as well even though they fold. I can’t stand the bud earphones and noise cancelling is a boon on trains and planes). And when I am on holiday I have other stuff as well so it does not add much. If I take the protective cover off it is a bit smaller but in any case it will sit inside my trouser pocket so I can take it most places. I am willing to trade off the size for the convenience of having everything on one player and not having to keep on deleting and adding stuff depending on what I want to listen to.
