This brandie new 5Gb Zen Micro was partial birthday present and partial present to myself. A nice match for my new interest in Podcasts and my lifelong love of music. Plays all the file-types I’m interested in and has a 10hr voice recorder and built in condenser Mic. The sound quality on the mic is much better than I would have expected. Sound quality from the Micro is also great, of course, and 5GB really is fairly big – not that I haven’t already wished for more, mainly because I was using the “removable hard drive” feature (which I set to 1GB) to transfer a ton of digital photos from my laptop to our home computer.

After having the player for a day, I figured out that the adapter I bought years ago for a portable CD player would work great to give me some sweet tunes in my beat up old truck.

I’ve also made myself a padded metal case using an Altoids tin based on the info I found on this forum: http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?p=1203112 Cool stuff. Many folks are modding these tins for the Micro based on the perfect sizing. I have not gotten around to cutting a hole for jack access in the top, so I still take it out when I want to listen, but it sure beats the cloth bag for putting the thing in my bag to carry to work or wherever. I have a Dremel tool, so it’s only a matter of time. I’ll try to post a picture when it’s done.