MP3 Players Update - The Zens good after all

After reading many posts on Creative's forum I decided to try another Zen Micro. So I bought another, this one works fine, the FM radio picks up most of the strong stations, although it is still useless on the weak ones. I have now had time to give the unit a thorough work-out. The software that comes with the unit works, but this is far superior. If you are looking for a good compact iPod mini rival, then look no further than the Zen Micro. Check them out at this price comparison site.

Flippers

Wendy bought some flip cards called flippers that come on a ring, they are about 1” x 2.5” and we bought some avery labels to fit them. We have just filled the first set with French words on one side and English on the other. So we can now use these as study aids.

We hope these are a help as you can either view the French side and then flip them over to check the English translation, or read the English side and try to remember the equivalent French.

MP3 Players - continued

Well, I finally made a decision and went and bought an MP3 player. I plumped for the Creative Zen Micro, 5Gb with built in FM radio. First impressions were very favourable, the demo tracks sounded good. So I copied some familiar albums onto it, these too sounded great.

This device can also be used as a solid state disk drive, which would prove very useful for me transferring files to and from my clients.

After a while navigating the menu's I decided to try the FM radio.... what a disappointment, it auto scanned and preset some stations, however most of the stations it had preset could either not be heard or were of very poor quality. I decided to try it outside, it was no better, in fact an old Sony Walkman Cassette/Radio performed far better !

I tried updating the firmware, but this did not help.

So it was with regret that I took it back for a refund, the Creative support team suggested I ran the headphone lead under my coat (not ideal as I wanted to use it indoors !) .

So I am now looking for an alternative MP3 player, any suggestions welcome.

MP3 Players - Learning the language

We have been looking at buying an MP3 player as this will be far more convenient than using tapes and CDs for language learning. However there are so many out there it’s difficult knowing which one to go for. Dennis was interested in the Rio Nitrus, but read some unfavourable reviews, so it’s back to the investigations. Any suggestions appreciated.

French Language Learning

We have been listening to a course by Michel Thomas, it’s on 8 tapes/CDs and is an alternative way of learning, you are not supposed to consciously try to remember anything, or write anything down, we do find it is helping, and saves us having to listen to Sting in the car (the only CD Wendy plays).

However, we have to be careful, Graham was listening to these tapes in his car whilst driving through his village (Ganges) when he missed a stop sign and was involved in an accident which resulted in his car being written off, luckily, no one was hurt.