CREATIVE.COM : New: Zen Touch

CREATIVE.COM : Products : Zen Touch: "INTRODUCTION


CREATIVE ZEN TOUCH PORTABLE AUDIO PLAYER FEATURES ULTRA-COOL TOUCH PAD SCROLLING AND PATENTED TECHNOLOGY ACHIEVING 24-HOUR BATTERY LIFE
Longest Battery Life Ever for a Digital Audio Jukebox - Three Times Greater than iPod Specification


MILPITAS, Calif. - June 7, 2004 - Creative (NASDAQ: CREAF), a worldwide leader in digital entertainment products for PC users, today introduced the Zen Touch, a 1.8-inch hard drive-based portable audio player that holds twice the music and provides up to three times the battery life as a 20GB Apple® iPod™*. The Zen Touch 20GB is available for preorder today exclusively at Amazon.com and www.creative.com for only $US269.99.

Introducing the innovative patent pending "Touch Pad" control, the Creative Zen Touch enables a user to simply move a thumb up and down in a natural motion on the Touch Pad to navigate quickly and easily to specific albums, artists, genres, tracks, or playlists. With a very light touch of the thumb on the Touch Pad or by pressing the "OK" button on the face of the player, users can easily access musical selections. The face of the player also features a dedicated "Random" button for spontaneous music playback of any combination of songs.

"The Zen Touch is so simple and fun to use because the Touch Pad makes it easy to find your favorite songs, or you can just hit the random button for a mix of music to match any mood," said Lisa O'Malley, senior brand manager for portable audio at Creative. "Plus you can take the Zen Touch on long trips and leave the power cable at home without worrying about the rechargeable battery running out."

Equally as cool-looking as it is feature-rich, the metallic graphite and white gloss-colored Zen Touch displays track and menu information on its large, brilliant blue backlit LCD screen. In addition to its groundbreaking battery life and super-intuitive user interface, the Zen Touch provides industry-leading audio quality and broad compatibility with download services supporting WMA and MP3 music for enjoyment of up to 10,000 songs. Crystal-clear high fidelity playback at 98dB SNR can be customized with a four-band graphic equalizer with eight equalization presets. USB 2.0 connectivity enables super-fast music transfer from a PC as quickly as a song per second.

Exclusively previewed by Microsoft at the 2004 WinHEC event, the Zen Touch was showcased as the first player to support upgrade to the next generation of Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, a platform for providing exciting new subscription models for content download.

"With its exciting new device, the Zen Touch, Creative sets a new bar for battery life and provides music fans a broad choice of music services accessed within Windows Media Player," said Jonathan Usher, director of the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft Corp. "The Zen Touch is the first in a new line of products from Creative that will support our next generation Windows Media DRM, enabling new playback scenarios for subscription-based or on-demand digital music."

The new Creative Zen Touch 20GB, available today for preorder online at Amazon.com and www.creative.com for $US269.99, is slated for shipment this month. The ultra-portable audio player comes with a black protective case, neodymium headphones, a USB 2.0 cable, and a universal power adapter. The player also includes Creative MediaSource™, an easy-to-use application for ripping CDs, organizing entire digital music collections, and easily transferring MP3 and WMA files.

For more information about Creative portable audio players, please visit www.creative.com