Creative Officially Announces New ZEN X-Fi And ZEN X-Fi With Wireless LAN

The worldwide leader in digital entertainment products for PC users, Creative Technology has officially announced the launch of its new Creative ZEN X-Fi and ZEN X-Fi with Wireless LAN digital media players, featuring award-winning Xtreme Fidelity X-Fi audio technology.

With X-Fi Crystalizer audio technology, these stylish and cool portable media players can provide a breakthrough in sound quality for MP3, WMA and unprotected iTunes music.

“We’re very excited to achieve this breakthrough of adding our X-Fi audio technology to a ZEN player, setting the highest standard in audio quality for portable music players. Some of the top recording artists in the music industry are very outspoken about the poor quality of digital music. We addressed the issue of the poor quality of digital music by inventing X-Fi technology, which restores the quality of music that is lost during the digital ripping process, and now for the first time ever we’ve been able to implement this technology in a ZEN,” said Craig McHugh, President and COO of Creative. “We also give you the freedom and flexibility of being able to listen to music, watch videos and view photos on your Creative ZEN X-Fi with Wireless LAN that are stored on your PC. You can also wirelessly add your favourite music, videos and photos to your player from your PC, so you’ll always have them with you wherever you go.”

Highlights Of Creative ZEN X-Fi and Creative ZEN X-Fi with Wireless LAN:

• A vibrant 2.5-inch TFT display with 16.7 million colour support for an excellent viewing experience with videos and album art
• A built-in speaker so you can listen to favourite songs with friends
• X-Fi Expand to move and expand the sound forward for a natural listening experience over headphones that simulates the sound from stereo speakers
• An SD card slot so you can add more music, video or photos to the player
• Built-in FM radio with 32 presets
• Built-in microphone for voice recording
• The new Creative Centrale application for organising, CD and playlist creation, and transfer of a wide variety of video formats, including WMV, AVI, MJPEG, MPEG4-SP, DivX 4 and 5 and XviD
• Using Creative Centrale, player syncs with Microsoft Outlook – contact, calendar, “To Do” list and more
• Creative ZEN X-Fi Video Converter, which converts video files to formats suitable for wireless streaming, will be made available for web download early August 2008
• Exclusively on Creative ZEN X-Fi with Wireless LAN models, enjoy free instant messaging over popular IM services including Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live! Messenger. Chat with friends and express yourself using personalised emotive avatars with different facial expressions and hair styles

According to the company, “From the living room to the bedroom, the Creative ZEN X-Fi with Wireless LAN can access the music on your home PC, which can be played through the built-in speaker, a home speaker system, or even the Creative ZEN X-Fi Docking Speaker System accessory, which provides room-filling X-Fi audio quality in a portable speaker. You can also stream and download your video files in supported formats and your photos directly to your Creative ZEN X-Fi with Wireless LAN from your PC. In addition, you can stream a variety of ZENcast and podcast channels to the player.”

The new pocket-sized Creative ZEN X-Fi with Wireless LAN 16GB and 32GB model are now available in Singapore for S$329 and S$399, respectively. Besides, the new Creative ZEN X-Fi is expected to be available later this month for S$229.