TWO NEW CREATIVE ZEN players just became bonafide after weeks of speculation, rumours, water-cooler chat and leaked details of this that and the other.

They arrive in the form of the 8GB Zen X-Fi, 16 and 32GB models with wireless LAN built-in to the latter two and all based around their Xtreme Fidelity X-Fi audio technology.

Creative is still not listening to The INQ even in light of a recent review of its current model, as the Zen triplets arrive with the same old MP3, WMA and unprotected Itunes audio formats from before – still no lossless codecs onboard.

Although they try to make up for this by basing these new models around the X-Fi Crystalizer, a proprietary audio system developed at their advanced technology centre. This aims to restore the peaks and troughs that’s lost when music is encoded. Not exactly bridging the gap from lossless, but perhaps making somewhat of a headway and an effort at last

"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," said says Craig McHugh, president and COO of Creative.

"Some of the top recording artists in the music industry are very outspoken about the poor quality of digital music. We addressed this issue by inventing X-Fi technology, which restores the quality of music that is lost during the digital ripping process. Now for the first time ever we’ve been able to implement this technology in a Zen.”

Most of the features and abilities are just as before with the previous Zen, along with almost the same physical dimensions and the bulkiest of bulky builds with the SD card slot. This time around though they’ve built-in a speaker, which wasn’t present before. Just in case you didn’t want to be socially frowned upon by blasting music out, Creative has thrown in a set of their premium EP-830 in-ear earphones.

The 802.11b/g Wi-Fi is primarily there of course for streaming to the device and getting content onboard in the first place wirelessly. They’ve also enabled instant messaging, over services such as Yahoo messenger and Windows Live messenger using an onscreen T9 keyboard of sorts. What’s missing here is Bluetooth, as it’s their premium mp3 player with a wire-free flavour we would have thought they’d have finally included it – if for their own headphones alone.

Prices for the new Zen X-Fi shipping in August are £109.99 for the 8GB, £139.99 for the 16GB X-FI with Wireless LAN and £199.99 for 32GB. This is compared to 8GB Zen player for £92.28, £159.99 for the 16 and £249.99 for 32GB.

Back to the drawing board Creative, give us a call when you've listened to your users and critics. As it needs an internet browser, lossless codec’s, Bluetooth and to be flash enabled to be truly competitive – here endeth the sermon. µ