I love both. The looks on the m:robe are so sweet though.. but then, the Zen Micro's software and GUI is superior. Sound quality wise, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, and there's a patch for the low volume now.
Tough call. I've only played around with the Zen Micro, but I own the mrobe 100 (picked it up on the infamous Radio Shack deal). Here are some thoughts...
I haven't used Creative's MediaSource software, but it's probably better than m:trip. The initial version that comes with the player is buggy and crashes often, the upgrade from their site fixes this though. If you have a music collection over 5 gigs, you have to manually check (or uncheck rather) the songs you do not want transferred to a player. As you can imagine it's time consuming and annoying. If you just wanna transfer a small collection of tunes it's fine though.
The on player GUI is very easy to use and intuitive, just as good as the Zen Micro's if not better. The controls are less finicky on the m:robe IMO; there can be a bit of lag when changing songs though, not sure how it compares to the Zen in that area.
Sound quality on the m:robe is very good to my ears, especially after the firmware update that makes it really loud (tested using EX51's). Haven't tested the Micro. Battery life isn't great, probably 7-8 hours with a little fiddling. Boot time is a little slow (13-14 seconds) but not awful.
For $100 it's a steal, I'm not sure how much more I'd for it though. Hope that helps.
I currently own a nomad jukebox 3 and the m:robe 100 so i use both programs to transfer music. The creative softwear is bad the M:robe is so, so much worse. It blows so much ass that I dread having to take a song off of it. In order to do that you have to delete the song from your music library as far as i can tell or hide the album or track from the softwear by moving it. you can't just delete it from the mrobe. Also you can't chose what music you want to put on it. It will only sync with your music library till you run out of music or it runs out of harddrive space. the software will only rip Cd's in WMA format as well. There might be ways around this but I haven't been able to find any.
Creatives software is rather user friendly now days but is very resource hungry. You can't really surf the web and rip or transfer music at the same time. You can't do this with the m:robe either by the way.
The m:robe is also kind of hard to navigate. It assumes that you like playlists more than albums acording to its menue setup but you can't make playlists on the fly. whe the backlite turns off after 5, 10, 15, 30 seconds depending on the setting you can't read the screen at all even in direct sunlite. Since the whole face of the device is smooth and touch sesitive in order to put it in your pocket you have to flip the hold switch. Now when you pull it out of you pocket you can't read the screen because its in idle mode so you have to flip the hold switch and then press on the pad. It gets annoying. I don't know why it was made with an unviewable screen. Other than that Its not too bad of a player and does look very slick! I sound like I'm bashing it but i don't regret buying the player. It's like a combination of the monolith from 2001 a space oddesy and an old led football game and is to me one of the coolest looking players around. For a hundred bucks how can you go wrong? However if the gripes i have are the gripes you'd have I'd get the creative player.
Thanks for the opinions.. any word on sound quality? As a little background to my preferences, Rio's Carbon sounded much too 'bright' for me, and I actually enjoyed the sound of the iRiver H10.. to a certain point. I'd describe myself as liking a more full, dynamic sound. Sony HD5 style.
The m:robe definitely wins out on looks. Anyone heard about this battery issue, though? I think I saw it on Engadget.. batteries suffering after only a year.
Thanks for the help. BTW, assume that they're at the same price-point. The ZM is 198CAD and the m:robe is 179CAD right now, so it's not much of a difference.
BTW, the Zen Micro Photo is out. Just want something simple that'll run well with a headphone amp, and that isn't made by Apple.
Yeah.. I've discovered that by switching my HD5 between headphone and line-out. I was thinking of going with one of the clearance minis, but those are all gone now.. I don't want to spend as much to get the 4Gb Nano, so I've narrowed it down to these two.
[EDIT]At the moment, I'm leaning towards the Zen Micro due to its removable battery... I think I read an article about the m:robe's rechargeable batter degradation somewhere, a la iPod 1G/2G/3G, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. With the mini, it wasn't a worry, but the m:robe doesn't have the same accessory base-- hence, I probably won't easily find a replacement battery.
Originally Posted by carsncars Yeah.. I've discovered that by switching my HD5 between headphone and line-out. I was thinking of going with one of the clearance minis, but those are all gone now.. I don't want to spend as much to get the 4Gb Nano, so I've narrowed it down to these two.
[EDIT]At the moment, I'm leaning towards the Zen Micro due to its removable battery... I think I read an article about the m:robe's rechargeable batter degradation somewhere, a la iPod 1G/2G/3G, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. With the mini, it wasn't a worry, but the m:robe doesn't have the same accessory base-- hence, I probably won't easily find a replacement battery.
I know that there are places where you can buy a replacment battery for your M:robe http://www.mrobe.org/ is a fanpage for Olympus mp3 players. There's not a lot of stuff on there but its useful. For example some ipod mini accesories work with the mrobe. Now that the mini is going the way of the dodo i'm sure they'll become cheap cheep.
As far as sound quality the M:robe is not that great out of the jack. It is a little better amped but my nomad jukebox 3 sounds much better out of the jack and amped through the line out. i'm not sure if micro sounds anything like my NJB3 but I bet it still is better than the m:robe.
I "owned" an mrobe mr-100 for about a month. It went back to RS for a number of reasons: (1) cannot operate controls when stored in a pocket, (2) short battery life of 8 to 10 hours, (3) screen not visible with backlight off, (4) bad music sync software, (5) 11 second boot up time, and (6) proprietary USB cable. I originally thought I would use the microdrive if the player was no good, but someone posted that this was not an option. BTW, if you use the latest mr-100 firmware, the max volume will increase but so will the minimum volume. This can be a problem if you like to fall asleep to soft music.
I have friends with the Zen Micro. The headphone jack weakness seems to be very prevalent among the Micros. I had the same jack problem on one of my Muvo2s. It seems that the jack is tack soldered to the PC board without additional mechanical help like metal tabs. It is too easy to yank on the headphone plug and stress the jack.
I dislike being limited by syncing software. A bad sync program can be so annoying. Both the Micro and MR-100 require syncing software. And that software is bad. The DAPs that I use the most are true drag and drop capable (Carbon, Iaudio 5, IHP-120, N200, Muvo2). My most recent player, the Rio Carbon, is very interesting in that it supports mp3 tags without the need for the syncing software.
My favorite small DAPs are the Iaudio 5 and the Rio Carbon 5gb. The Carbon is appealing because of the battery life (over 21 hours), controls, drag and drop, standard jacks, slimness, sound quality, storage capacity, and price ($99).
I liked my mr:100 alot; I have not owned a micro. But I am certain that the micro will not bring out the "wow" with your friends when you turn it on, and that the mr:100's showing up as a hard drive is really useful for transfering files, as I have not a flash drive and don't minding risking my mr:100's hard drive for file transfer. It's really not that big.
I didn't mind m:trip. It worked fine for me, and I preferred to pick out the songs myself for transfer anyways. Creative's software has always been buggier for me; though I admit that this was for the Nomad Zen that I had.
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