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My wife bought me a Creative Labs Zen Mp3 player for my birthday. It’s the most wonderful present I ever got, next to her and my children. She knew there were two criteria for me: a really good sounding mp3 player with enough memory to hold a substantial portion of my huge music collection. The rest was up to her.

Naturally, one of the candidates was the Apple IPod, and the other, Apple’s biggest rival to date, the Creative Labs Zen Vision M. Both are pretty comparable in features, but that’s where the comparison ends.

Before I go into how my wife bought mine, let me explain how I might have bought one. My first impulse was to buy a used IPod, which would have been a horrible move. Another reason is that it didn’t have nearly the amount of memory I wanted on my Mp3 player. But that leads to my second potential downfall: instant gratification.

When I want something, I want it RIGHT AWAY. Instant gratification has always been one my biggest weaknesses. I would have rushed to Circuit City or one of the other “big box” electronics stores, compared the ten or so options available there, and would have walked out with an overpriced IPod because I would get instant gratification. I would have owned the most popular brand of Mp3 player. This would have been a very bad decision for many reasons.

As with just about every financial decision she makes, my wife’s first move was to go online and do some research into Mp3 players in general. There she found what’s important to look for in an Mp3 player, and what’s not so important that marketing experts make seem important. Once she’s narrowed the field down that far, she started comparing products.

Amazon.com is the best way to go for comparison shopping for two reasons. First, they give a good baseline price by giving their own price as well as prices for their stable of marketplace sellers who sell the same products new and used. This gives the buyer a very good place to start. In my experience shopping, these prices are always substantially lower than retail.

The second great feature about buying electronics from Amazon is their customer reviews. Amazon has spent years cultivating good, bad and ugly reviews of the majority of the products they sell.

In doing so, my wife found that a LOT of people have had a LOT of trouble with their IPods. After a year or less, many I-Pods begin locking up and constantly needed to be reset for little or no reason, or they were failing to work at all. When reporting these problems to Apple, their pleas and complaints fell on deaf ears. The process of getting the IPods fixed proved expensive and time-consuming to the point where the owners gave up completely and moved on to another brand.

The Zen Vision M, meanwhile had a lot of great reviews from buyers, many of whom had owned IPods in the past. My wife also found that their warranties were more substantial, and that they had a better record for honoring the warranties, although given the quality of the product, they probably don’t need to do so as often.

Thus, on my birthday I opened up the box to find a beautiful lime green Creative Zen Vision M instead of an IPod and I couldn’t be happier. Besides having a way cooler name, the Zen goes with me everywhere, and will eventually have to be surgically removed. In buying my present, my wife got a better price, a better brand, a better product and a much happier husband.

Comment!

Are you a zen, ipod, or other kind of MP3 player person?

To what extent is your MP3 player a physical appendage?

Technorati Tags: Creative Labs Zen, Apple IPod, Apple, Circuit City, Amazon.com, Amazon

Filed under: Reviews on March 27th, 2007