A rival to the iPod? Creative <a href="http://www.newswireless.net/articles/030926-juke.html"> says it isn't. But with a 30 Gb capacity and a price of £250 odd, there will be some who decide that they'd rather have the ZEN NX jukebox.

Guy, the iPod has supported USB 2.0 for the last couple of iterations. Just buy the cable. (US$19.) (Aside: new Macs also have USB 2.0 ports as well as Firewrire 800 ports...)
The actual throughput of USB is unlikely to best Firewrire in the real world for a number of reasons. Raw speed isn't everything. There's overhead to consider in both protocols and Firewire is smarter at streaming.

They are going to wait for Apple to supply the drivers for their product? The unit won't mount as a storage device. It only uses USB2. No wonder Mac users don't bother with Creative!

FireWire is DMA based and uses low-latency network stack. USB 2.0 is interrupt driven and hogs up your CPU utilization. USB was designed for low bandwidth Mice and keyboards and was rigged to work faster under 2.0 but it is not an elegant solution by far. Firewire is the gold standard, don't get taken in by the claimed speed ratings, get Firewire whenever you can.

If you are going to have a hard drive in your MP3 player, it better be able to act as a drive as well. Plus the iPod is still more elegant in size and design and works with the Music Store and high quality MPEG4 AAC files.

This is a poorly researched article. iPod has supported USB 2.0 for quite some time though Firewire is still the performance king. Also, the 20GB and 40GB version of the iPod come with case, and earphones, as well as a docking station that lets you dock into your stereo system. No need for cumbersome batteries either-- the iPod contains rechargeable batteries.

This is the last time I'll ever visit this useless sight.

"There aren't any Mac drivers, for a start," said a publicity official - adding, mysteriously, "we're waiting for Apple to provide them."

either the guy is totally stupid or just loves to be cynical: apple will *not* spend one minute to create a driver for this device which would only lower their iPod sales.

as for the firewire/usb debatte:
both connectors are way too fast for the small hard drive.. the main advantage of FW is not speed but powersupply and less CPU required, the disadvantage is cost.

What a bizarre review. The only comparison made is download speed (wrongly) and price. What about usability, music-play quality, software, online music services, accessories... ?

I agree with the above. Don't hold your breath for Apple to make a driver for it. It is ridiculous in the extreme to even suggest it. Even if Apple didn't sell the iPod, why would they? They don't expect MS to write the driver for the PC connection do they?

USB 2 has THEORETICAL MAXIMUM throughput of 480 mps whereas Fiwire has a sustainable 400. In tests elsewhere on the net USB 2.0 may reach 120 - 150 mps which certainly seems (and is) faster to the user than USB 1 but does not even begin to reach firewire speed in a useable sense.

The speed of a connection over Firewire, alas, depends on a lot of things! Try comparing the speed of Xplay with MMJB for example. There are bottlenecks possible anywhere, and some of them make comparison of the raw hardware speed irrelevant - and this has always been true.

Of course, for readers who simply can't bear to see anything compared in any way favourably with an Apple branded product, the issue isn't whether there's a bottleneck. It's a question of "any stick will do" to discredit the report.

The report was simple enough: the device is cheaper than an iPod and for PC users, will be seen as an alternative.

It's not available for Mac, so saying how much better the Mac product is, seems bizarre.

There are no review samples available. It's not a review, so complaining about the lack of review features seems peculiar, to put it gently.

And the fact that USB 2.0 can only rarely match Firewire throughput doesn't alter the fact: at a quoted speed of above the Firewire speed, many people will think it's worth buying. You're quite right, all of you who reported that in some situations, Firewire will go faster... but that won't stop people seeing the spec and buying. That's what people do.

As for those who regard this as a "useless sight" well - we're glad to have readers, whatever their level of literacy!

:-)