Review: Creative Nomad MuVo² 4GB

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 5 November 2004, 00:00

Tags: Creative

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Introduction

The ultimate tiny MP3 player?


The tagline makes bold claims for the latest mini MuVo². Creative caters for a large section of the target market; various MuVo models, from NX to MuVo², offering 128MB to 4GB capacity and the ability to play WMA (Windows Media Audio), WAV and the ubiquitous MP3 file formats, in tiny packaging.

Much smaller than something like an Apple iPod or Creative's own Jukebox ZEN players, the MuVo range seeks to give you mobile music without any bulk. The majority are flash memory based with no moving parts and there's little scope for anything going wrong, but the flash memory format has capacity limits. Recently announced multi-GB flash memory densities, for use in things like MP3 players and flash memory cards are promising, but yet to ship in quantity or at any kind of sane cost.

So if you want more than 512MB of storage on your mobile music player, you're realistically looking at a hard disk based player. But that doesn't mean a jump up in size to iPod, ZEN or even iPod mini sized units. Nah, you can get big capacity from a hard disk based player in a tiny format. It's debatable whether the MuVo² is actually smaller than an iPod mini, cubic volume says not, but I certainly prefer the square format of the MuVo² over the teeny iPod's elongated shape. That's all personal opinion however, the fact is that small form factor mobile music with big capacity is doable and Creative wish to provide.

And of course it does that little bit more than music. Enter the Creative Nomad MuVo² 4GB.