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Last year, over 30 million iPod units (in their various incarnations) were sold. The market share held by Apple in the portable media arena is around 75 per cent. For any consumer electronics company in any field, these kinds of numbers are staggering and other manufacturers have been scrambling to shrink Apple’s slice of the pie.

Some units have come close. Last year, Creative took on the iPod mini with their Zen Micro, which proved to be the superior unit. Shortly after the Micro’s release, however, iPod dropped the Nano bomb and that was the end of that.

To break the iPod stranglehold, a competing product must not just be as good as its Apple counterpart, but substantially better.

Enter the Creative Zen Vision:M, a new contender for the Portable Video Player (PVP) of choice. Its Apple rival: The fifth generation 30GB iPod which, of course, features video playback.

Winning the coveted “Best in Show” title at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, it has been suggested that the Vision:M could be the iPod killer. Creative seems pretty confident — the M is actually slightly more expensive than its iPod counterpart. So, of course, I had to check it out.

Before you turn the unit on, you can’t help but notice that the physical dimensions of the M are almost exactly the same as the iPod. The M is a little chunkier both in terms of weight and thickness, but not so much that it’s a drawback. As a novelty, the M is available in five colours: Pink, blue and green to add to the white and black also offered in the iPod. The additional colour options on the M are decidedly too girly for my taste, but it’s nice to have the choice,

I guess. Navigation of the M is achieved using a “Vertical Touch Pad,” designed to counter the famous iPod Click Wheel.

The M’s Touch Pad makes you work a little harder than the Click Wheel and, if you’re already used to the iPod, the transition to the new layout might take a while. Buttons aside, the menu navigation on the M is completely intuitive and offers a little more in the way of customization than you get from the iPod.

Under the hood, the M really shines. The screen on both the iPod and the Vision:M are 2.5” and they display the same resolution. However, the M displays 262,000 colours to the iPod’s 65,000, which is a pretty big difference. The brightness rating is also greater on the M, giving the screen a definitive edge over the iPod. The M also throws in an FM tuner and a voice recorder — both of which are noticeably absent from all the Apple offerings. Battery life for audio is rated at a ho-hum 14 hours — the same the 30GB iPod. For video, the M has enough juice for 4 hours — twice the battery life of the iPod.

The biggest problem with the M is the same that faces every would-be usurper to the portable media throne: A lack of easy to access content. With your iPod, you can easily find and drop episodes of current and past television shows thanks to its seamless integration with iTunes. While Creative has their own programme in the works, it seems doubtful that they’ll be able to catch up to Apple on that front anytime soon. On the plus side, the M is compatible with the majority of formats of video that you might find on the net or create on your computer. In addition, it plays virtually every audio format as well so, unlike the iPod, if your music tastes run into the more eclectic, you can extend your music searches beyond iTunes.

iPod Killer? I would say not. The popularity of the iPod has not only arisen from the fact that it is a good product, but it makes the process of finding, downloading, organizing and playing media incredibly easy. The M is a fantastic product — it is, in fact, a better piece of hardware than the iPod.

But without the easy access to media offered by the iPod, it’s not going to be for everyone. If you are, however, computer and internet savvy and want to get away from the format limitations of the iPod (or just want to try something different), the M is for you.[[In-content Ad]]

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