Two Birds With One Stone
But Creative Labs didn't stop being creative there (terrible pun!). They said to themselves that if a drive needs a USB connector why not integrate a USB socket as well and make it a USB key. So you just have to slide the white tab to disconnect it from the battery housing and you have a USB key.
Tiny as it is, all you need do is connect your MuVo to a PC running Windows XP or Millennium and it will recognize the device without any special drivers. A driver is supplied for Windows 98. Better still, when it runs under XP, if you activate the command, as soon as it is connected the contents window opens. The MuVo then acts like a hard drive. You can then drag the files of your choice on or off it. So it acts like a super-diskette that will enable you to transport document and image files and game updates. Even when it's being used as an MP3 player, you don't need one of those complicated utilities to upload files to the device. All you have to do is copy the MP3 or WMA files, and once the battery housing is reconnected, you can listen to them. It would be hard to make it simpler!
Of course, this is not the most high-speed USB key on the market but the transfer time is acceptable. It takes 45 seconds to load 10 MB. The quickest keys, such as the Disk On Key, do this in 15 seconds. Loading the full 60.4 MB of the formatted MuVo will thus take around 5 minutes, depending on the number of files. That's still quite acceptable.
