The Zen of MP3 Part Deux Point Oh

Well, I was a bad boy and dropped my Zen micro one too many times. A few days ago I dropped the damn thing and it came up with a panic menu with options like FORMAT, REBOOT, and all sorts of goodies. Luckily a few minutes later it came back to life and ran for a couple of days more until, you guessed it, I dropped it again and it won't get past the failure menu.

DEAD.

It's really sad, you can hear the hard disk scraping when you put your ear to the Zen Micro, just sad.

Anyway, I ran out to Worst Buy the next day and got a replacement Zen and this time picked the black version of the 4GB Zen V Plus which is about half the size of the Zen Micro, has a color display, can show pictures and videos, quite a cute little toy. Didn't even have to install new software or a new USB cable as it works with my existing USB cable just fine. Uploaded all my MP3's and Yahoo Music and was back in action in no time.

For those of you about to ask why I didn't get an iPod, my wife has 2 of the fucking things and I hate using them. More than I loathe Apple and the crappy iPod interface, I loathe being locked into iTunes. They can take that proprietary shit and shove it which is why I also didn't get a Zune although they looked pretty cool. She didn't buy them either, they were gifts, so she's just stuck using them to be polite. FWIW, she picked my first Zen for me as a present so we all know what she prefers!

The new Zen V rocks!

It's not touch sensitive like the old Zen Micro and has mechanical switches and everything is flush to the case so it's damn near next to impossible to accidentally engage a command so I've not used the LOCK function yet.

The only downsides I've seen so far is that scrolling the list of All Tracks is slower than shit and if your unit LOCKS UP, which mine did once setting it up, the RESET button on the side needs tools that only a microbiologist would possess to depress that micro button. Word to the wise, keep a safety pin handy in case it locks up because you can't open the back and remove the battery or anything useful like that, you're just fucked without micro-tools handy.

Since I was replacing the Zen it seemed a no brainer to treat myself with a pair of new headphones and got a set of Bose Triport headphones which are very nice. Not the most expensive Bose headphones out there, but they sound damn nice compared to the Sony headphones I was using.

Yes, the Bose are big but I hate earbuds.

Anyway, this time the Zen upgrade was completely painless and I'm a happy boy with a new toy.