The Richter Scale^®

Almost four months ago I wrote a review of the Creative Zen Micro after having used one for six months.

I have been procrastinating sending the semi-broken unit in, but a couple of weeks ago, the Zen Micro I had purchased for my wife also failed, in that it would no longer boot up (unless connected to a PC or wall power supply, but not on battery).

So now I’m struggling with Creative’s customer service department to get two RMA numbers for these units.

Two out two units failing (and my wife rarely uses hers) in less then 10 month’s time is pretty ridiculous. I downgrade the Zen Micro to a 3.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale as a result.

And then, adding insult to injury (no fault of Creative’s) is that Yahoo! is significantly (double the price) increasing the cost of their subscription music service if you want to continue to use subscribed music on a portable player (like the Zen Micro).

To heck with that. I’ll just go buy my CD’s on the cheap at Amazon’s CDNOW Preferred Buyer’s Club and then rip them into MP3s so I can use them on something more reliable like an Apple iPod. The new 60GB Video iPods sure look interesting…