Zen Style M300 - good and bad I'm afraid!

Question

Neat, easy to operate, clear (though small) screen.
I can li've with it as it works OK for the price - BUT it really needs firmware updates and co-operation with OSs and Apps:
. Has anybody at Creative heard of Linux? If you Google 'Linux' you'll find that there are many millions of us who use it now. If you are confused by the number of distributions you could do worse than ensuring that your products function well with Ubuntu. Please contribute to the Linux community by providing info to allow your players to be recognised by Rhythmbox, Banshee etc (as older ipods are). In the meantime give clear instructions as to how to operate the M300 with say Ubuntu / Banshee. Files that are hidden in Windows appear in Linux - you should have stored all config files in a Config folder - not the root. At least your device appears as two USB attached storage devices so I can add files in Linux easily.
2. You MUST implement bookmarking (both in Music and on SDCard. If I listen to a podcast or audiobook I need to come back to the same place - after listening to other stuff. The device does not even remember where you are on the SDCard if you pause before shutdown. This then needs new menus 'Bookmarks' in Music and SDCard.
3. Playlists are a shambles - why insist on Unicode / Winamp? The Unicode step stops synching and complicates updating playlists horribly. There is no Winamp for Linux - and you don't publish exactly how you want the playlist format to be as far as I can see. Why not implement a Now Playing queue so you can select a number of files that will get queued for playing? Then you could add a menu item the the Now Playing menu to Save As a playlist (OK you would have to name it something - maybe just 'Playlist date time'). You can't make playlists for the SDCard files.
4. Your user guide is very poor - loads of pages with just a few lines on each. It doesn't even say clearly how to arrange files and folders in Music:
I found out by trial & error that the player isn't fussy - it just sees all files in Music - however for sanity it is best to arrange with folders Artist - Album - Files. The SDCard listings just see filenames not ID3 track names - really bad for podcasts that often have horrible long filenames.
5. On the subject of ID3 - would it do any harm to mention that the player only understands ID3v2.3? It took me a huge search on the web to find out why your player did not read the mp3 data - and lists as Unknown Artist, Unknown Album - that was in ID3v2.4. In Linux I can easily change the tags to v2.3 - but it is annoying to have to do so.
(to engineers at Creative: ID3v2.4 was created in the year 2000 - do keep up!)
6. The SDCard MUST integrate into main memory - it is so clunky not having the same facilities for it as in the Music folder. This must be so that you can charge more for M300s with more basic memory!
To sum up:
When you create web pages you test them thoroughly with different browsers - and when you create devices like the M300 you must test them and make sure that non-technical users can operate them easily in Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux Ubuntu, Mac OS: in each case with a good free app available for the synching. Nowadays we use devices with a whole range of systems at home and at work.
I wish you'd sent me a pre-production model to give you this feedback a few months ago!
If I sound irritated - I am - mainly because its a lovely little player with some hugely irritating characteristics.
OK - top firmware update requset: bookmarks!

Answer 1

Hi,
Thank you for the feedback.