Strengths: Small size. Durable. Built-in speaker. Nice display.

Weaknesses: Browsing by folder.

Summary: The zen stone plus works well for a compact MP3 player. It has the most important features (plays MP3 files well, plays DRM, can browse by folder) and is well built. It's main weakness is the implementation of the browse by folder option. Browsing by folder is difficult to start, slow and buggy. Browsing by folder is difficult to reach because it requires four button presses to navigate to the folder list (center button, right button, center button, center button). Once in the folder list, the user can slowly scroll through each folder name and listen to the first song in the folder. The zen stone plus takes a second or so to move from one folder title to the next. That doesn't sound like a lot of time, but when you have thirty or more folders (a reasonable number for a 2GB MP3 player). It would take 30 seconds to navigate to the last folder. Another feature that makes browse by folder slow to use is that the navigating the list does not wrap around. For example, if you start at the first folder you have to move forward through every folder to reach the last folder instead of simply moving back one folder. The last gripe about browsing by folder is that if the music is organized with subfolders, for example, folders with artist's name each containing folders for each of the artist's albums, then the zen stone plus will list entries for each album. The first folder name in the list will be the artist name and the next item in the list will be the artist album. Both of these entries are for the same album, so you must scroll through double the amount of entries and listen to a snippet of the first song of each album twice. What a pain. Creative should try to fix this problem with a firmware upgrade. For an example of how to do folder browsing the right way, they need only look at the zen nano plus. On the nano plus, it takes only two button presses to reach to folder list. The list scrolls quickly. It handles subfolder properly. And the list is circular. Just great. The zen stone plus is almost great. Almost wish I would have bought the zen stone (not plus) which has a skip folder button.