The Creative Zen Touch

Meant to be a direct competitor to the iPod, back when you COULD compete with the iPod, I bought this for myself with some high school graduation money I got in summer of 2005.

This thing was, basically, an iPod except instead of the clickwheel, it had a little touchpad that allowed you to scroll up and down in the center, in that groove where the OK button lives. It sorta made more intuitive sense to me than the clickwheel did, personally.

This thing had a 20(?) gig hard drive in it, and considering the hard drive I had in the computer I built brand new right before high school ended had an 80 gig hard drive (and this was Alot at the time) that's quite a decent chunk of storage for the era!

If you had old enough firmware you could flash a custom pixel image to replace the Creative Zen logo that displays during the bootup sequence.

It also had a very shitty battery. I think I replaced the battery in it twice before I gave up, after only two years the battery only lasted an hour. The replacement didn't even last 8 months before getting to that point. Ultimately this is why I moved on from it.