Surprisingly, the Creative Zen Micro Photo is a fraction smaller (51 by 84 by 18mm) than its monochrome-screen sibling, yet it manages to pack in 2GB to 3GB more storage, offering an 8GB microdrive, or about 2,000 songs. It doesn't pack on any extra weight either, keeping its lightweight status at 116g. And you still get the easily removable and replaceable battery, a standard mini USB connection, and a hold switch. There's also a choice of ten colours -black, dark blue, grey, green, light blue, orange, pink, purple, red and white- though some shades are slightly different than those of the Zen Micro. But the main difference, of course, is the Zen Micro Photo's small-but-pretty, full-colour OLED screen. It measures 41mm (1.6 inches) diagonally, can display 262,144 colours, and is viewable from any angle.

The Creative Zen Micro Photo has an easily removable battery that any user can replace. The innovative touch pad that made its debut on the Creative Zen Micro carries over to the Photo, though it has been slightly improved. Foremost, Creative has decreased the sensitivity of the Low setting so that the pad doesn't seem nearly as touchy as the original Micro's. Also, the face of the player has a textured feel to it, lending a more tactile sensation to the controls. Still, those used to pressing real buttons might need some time to adjust. The layout of the touch pad remains the same, with a vertical scroll strip flanked by back, rewind, play/pause, fast-forward and menu keys. This, combined with a great user interface, makes for highly intuitive navigation.

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Creative recently patented the interface found on the Zen Micro Photo. In fact, the Creative interface is used on many popular MP3 players, including the Apple iPod. The interface is hierarchy-based, which means you navigate to a genre, then an artist, then an album, and finally a track. Of course, you can also go directly to any of the last three, as well as straight to a playlist that you've created on the PC, then transferred over. In addition, the Zen Micro Photo includes a DJ that will decide for you. This MP3 player's interface is very easy to use.

The Creative Zen Micro Photo ships with a soft pouch, a USB cable (used for both transferring and charging), a pair of decent earbuds, a user manual and an install disc. The last includes Creative's MediaSource software, a music-management app that we largely ignored, as well as Windows Media Player 10 and Adobe Acrobat Reader. The most important thing on the disc, though, is the Creative Zen Micro Photo application, which establishes the connection between player and computer. It also encompasses a digital user guide and two useful programs called Zen Micro Photo Media Explorer and Creative Media Tool Box. The first is a Windows Explorer-like program that lets you easily access and organise files on the player, while the second includes convenient tools such as an automatic tag cleaner (operating via Gracenote's Music ID service) and an automatic organiser (based on ID3 tag info).

Features
The Creative Zen Micro Photo certainly doesn't lack features. It's an MP3 player that also accepts WAV and WMA files, including those downloaded as part of Napster To Go and other on-the-go music subscription services. Additionally, it's a photo viewer with a nine-by-nine thumbnail grid for previewing and the ability to support separate albums, represented as folders on the device.

Unfortunately, Creative does not successfully marry these two concepts. You can't listen to music and browse photos simultaneously -- a bummer since having something to look at while you jam to your favourite tunes significantly adds to the experience. Also, album art isn't supported, but this can be forgiven easily since it shows track info and time elapsed anyway. Remember, the screen is fairly small in the first place.

Fortunately, your eyes won't get too bored because you can tinker with the eight 'themes' while your music plays. The themes are a variety of interface colour schemes, and if they don't interest you, you can set your favourite photo as wallpaper. The Creative Zen Micro Photo also offers shuffle, repeat and resume playback settings as well as eight preset equalisers (Acoustic, Classical, Disco, Jazz, New Age, Pop, Rock and Vocal) and a five-band user-defined mode. There's also a Bass Boost option and a Smart Volume setting that levels the volume across all tracks.