Creative Zen Mozaic review

The Zen Mozaic is the latest member of the award winning Creative Zen PMP family. It has been priced and positioned to compete with the likes of the iPod Shuffle and the Sandisk Sansa Clip which we reviewed recently. It bridges the gap between the Creative Zen Stone / Stone Plus / Zen V Plus and the Creative Zen / Zen Vision M. With the launch of the Zen Mozaic, Creative’s Zen line of PMP’s is now almost complete spanning all budget ranges, specifications and features. Creative’s Zen music players are known to deliver astounding sound quality at a reasonable price, which is why they are the favorites of many a audiophile. Let’s check out if the Zen Mozaic lives up to it’s family name and manages to deliver.

Creative Zen Mozaic Specifications:

• Capacity: 2 GB / 4 GB / 8 GB Flash memory
• Dimensions: 3.1″ x 1.6″ x 0.5″
• Weight: 43 gms
• Colors: Silver, Black and Pink
• Screen: 1.8″ 64K Color OLED, 128 x 160 pixels
• Battery: 32 hours Audio playback
• Transfer Type: USB - MTP
• Audio Formats: WMA, MP3, WAV, Audible 4
• Video Formats: Motion JPEG
• Equaliser: 8 presets and 5 band custom EQ, Bass boost
• Accessories: USB Cable, Earbuds, Creative Software

Other Features : FM Radio, Voice Recorder, Built-in Speaker, Organiser, Photo Viewer, Date & Time, Alarm

Design:

The Zen Mozaic has a very aesthetically pleasing and soothing design. With dimensions of 3.1″ x 1.6″ x 0.5″ and a weight of just 43 gms, it is very portable. The whole body is made of hard plastic, including the screen. The plastic has a good feel and provides a good grip. The buttons blend in perfectly with the mozaic design. They control buttons include four directional buttons, a select button in the center and Back, Menu, Play / Pause and shortcut buttons. Creative has fitted in almost every control it could on the player, and yet managed to give it an uncrowded look. There is a Power / Hold button on the left and the headphone jack and mini USB port on the bottom of the player. The build quality of the Zen Mozaic is superb and the plastic seems very tough and durable. Also due to the presence of flash memory and an OLED display, we are absolutely sure that it can easily withstand minor falls and shocks. All in all, the Zen Mozaic has a cool design with great build quality.

Display and Interface:

The Zen Mozaic sports a 1.8″ OLED display supporting 64K colors and a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels. It is a cute little display which blends in with the overall design. The inclusion of an OLED display helps in decreasing the cost of the Mozaic and improves the battery life but compromises on display quality. However, it does handle the menu animations and transitions pretty well. Don’t expect great video playback from the OLED display though.

The interface is very pleasing visually. It has almost all of the options that you would find on the other Zen players. The UI is very intuitive and easy to use with cool effects and animations thrown in. Even a technologically challenged person can navigate through the Zen Mozaic with ease. It has customizable menus and a shortcut button. You can set any image as the wallpaper and choose between different themes. Music can be sorted by album, artist, playlist etc while images are sorted into folders. Each of the image folders contains a cool 3 x 4 grid containing thumbnails of the pictures. You can rotate and zoom in the pictures and also view them as a slideshow with music playing in the background.

Audio and Video playback:

The Zen Mozaic has great sound quality especially if you pair it with great headphones. It will satisfy almost all casual users but it falls slightly short of audiophile quality. It lacks clarity in the higher end of the spectrum. It has enough volume to drive almost all headphones without using amps. The Music interface is almost the same as the other Creative PMPs - easy to use and packed with features. The speaker offers decent sound quality with good volume. The Zen Mozaic can play the WMA, MP3, WAV and Audible 4 formats natively. You can convert your music to these formats using the bundled Creative Centrale software. It supports the MTP transfer protocol which means that it isn’t detected as a mass storage device and works only with Windows XP / Vista. With some hacks, it can be made to work with Linux and Mac as well.

The Zen Mozaic is underpowered to play most of the common codecs and coupled with a 1.8″ OLED display supporting 256K colors, video playbck is not exactly it’s forte. It can play just M-JPEG encoded videos which are blurry and grainy. If you are looking for a video player, the Mozaic is not an option. The OLED display wasn’t meant to play videos but to provide a good visual interface for music playback and other features. The videos can be encoded using the bundled Creative Centrale software.

Other Features:

The Zen Mozaic offers a host of additional features - FM Radio, Voice Recorder, Built-in Speaker, Organiser, Photo Viewer, Date & Time, Alarm. Most of them are self explanatory. The FM Radio has decent reception and the ability to set 32 presets. You also have the autoscan feature to automatically scan and save channels. There is no option for FM recording though.
The voice recorder works good and records in a low bitrate WAV format. The Zen Mozaic also has a built-in speaker which is loud enough to be heard across a small room, but lacks a bit in quality. It isn’t suited for high quality music but does fine for voice recordings and audiobooks. You can also view JPEG images on the Mozaic with the built-in Photo viewer in a list or icon format as well as a slideshow. It also has basic PIM functionality which allows you to synch contacts, calendar and tasks with MS Outlook.

The Zen Mozaic has a battery life of about 30 hours for audio and about 5 hours for video playback. THis is standard for a Music player but more battery power would have been appreciated. It comes bundled with the standard USB data cable, earbuds and the drivers and Creative software CD.

Pros:

• Great Build Quality
• Easy to Use, Intuitive UI
• Inexpensive

Cons:

• Mediocre Display
• Bad Video Playback

Conclusion:

The Creative Mozaic is a good buy and beats the iPod Shuffle hands down in terms of features and design. It is almost at par with the Sandisk Sansa Clip, both make for good buys. At $60, the Zen Mozaic is an inexpensive player with loads of features and is amongst the best options in this range. We would recommend it to anyone who needs a cheap little player with a cool design, sturdy build quality and loads of features.

Our Rating: 3.5 / 5.