Rating: 
Summary: Great player for the right people...
Review: ...and I'm one of them. I've had this thing for a little over a year now, and have been loving having my entire music collection at the touch of a button (or a couple of buttons). For anyone who has this product or is thinking of getting one, I would recommended looking for notmad software for it. I think that it works better than the creative soft. that comes with the player, and there is a free version you can try out. There is no absolutely no problem swapping both files and music back and forth from PC to the player, anyone who tells you different just doesn't know any better.
As to some other great things, the sound is excellent (but it depends on what you put on it, garbage in=garbage out), the battery life is great, but not the 11 hours as claimed, I get anywhere from 6-10 hours depending on the settings (the eax function, shuffle, and having large playlists seem to shorten battery time). I bought this player because I can record directly into it from any source in various formats (wav and all sorts of mp3 bitrates), and the firewire transfer rate is super fast, haven't tried USB yet.
As to portability, I find that this CD walkman sized (actually a little smaller) player is easy to carry around. Is it an iPod? No. Is it easier than carrying all 650 or so CDs that I have on it? Heck yeah. I carry this thing in a little CD player case with an RCA cable and headphones, which makes it easy to listen to my music in any situation. Great for parties, I just make a playlist and plug into where ever there are RCA jacks (and they're everywhere!)
Another great thing is that Creative is really good at upgrading the firmware to this machine, which impresses the hell out of me. What other portable music device constantly changes for the better? You definetely want to check for updates, the latest one adds a clock, and a new skin for the now playing window (great modern look) and has tabbed menus along with some other great improvements. The firmware upgrades are extremely easy to download and apply, and I've never had a bugs or bad installs. I know that I will have this thing for a long time, even if the hard disk eventually fails. I can just put a new notebook drive in there if I had to (I bought mine aftermarket with a 60 gig drive in it, which wasn't available before).
As to negatives, did have a few minor crashes (which meant that when you reset it, it would work right away) and a couple of big ones (which meant that when you restarted it, it would have to rebuild its library, which can take some time if you have a lot of music) but after updating the software and firmware, haven't had a problem since. When it crashed, instead of hitting reset I just pulled out the battery and put it back in. Might not be the best thing for it, but it's easier than carrying around a paper clip for the reset button. But like I said, haven't had a crash for quite a while now.
As other reviewers have said, if for some reason I lost my Nomad (knock on wood), I'd be right back here buying a new one.
Rating:
Summary: Great player for the right people...
Review: ...and I'm one of them. I've had this thing for a little over a year now, and have been loving having my entire music collection at the touch of a button (or a couple of buttons). For anyone who has this product or is thinking of getting one, I would recommended looking for notmad software for it. I think that it works better than the creative soft. that comes with the player, and there is a free version you can try out. There is no absolutely no problem swapping both files and music back and forth from PC to the player, anyone who tells you different just doesn't know any better.
As to some other great things, the sound is excellent (but it depends on what you put on it, garbage in=garbage out), the battery life is great, but not the 11 hours as claimed, I get anywhere from 6-10 hours depending on the settings (the eax function, shuffle, and having large playlists seem to shorten battery time). I bought this player because I can record directly into it from any source in various formats (wav and all sorts of mp3 bitrates), and the firewire transfer rate is super fast, haven't tried USB yet.
As to portability, I find that this CD walkman sized (actually a little smaller) player is easy to carry around. Is it an iPod? No. Is it easier than carrying all 650 or so CDs that I have on it? Heck yeah. I carry this thing in a little CD player case with an RCA cable and headphones, which makes it easy to listen to my music in any situation. Great for parties, I just make a playlist and plug into where ever there are RCA jacks (and they're everywhere!)
Another great thing is that Creative is really good at upgrading the firmware to this machine, which impresses the hell out of me. What other portable music device constantly changes for the better? You definetely want to check for updates, the latest one adds a clock, and a new skin for the now playing window (great modern look) and has tabbed menus along with some other great improvements. The firmware upgrades are extremely easy to download and apply, and I've never had a bugs or bad installs. I know that I will have this thing for a long time, even if the hard disk eventually fails. I can just put a new notebook drive in there if I had to (I bought mine aftermarket with a 60 gig drive in it, which wasn't available before).
As to negatives, did have a few minor crashes (which meant that when you reset it, it would work right away) and a couple of big ones (which meant that when you restarted it, it would have to rebuild its library, which can take some time if you have a lot of music) but after updating the software and firmware, haven't had a problem since. When it crashed, instead of hitting reset I just pulled out the battery and put it back in. Might not be the best thing for it, but it's easier than carrying around a paper clip for the reset button. But like I said, haven't had a crash for quite a while now.
As other reviewers have said, if for some reason I lost my Nomad (knock on wood), I'd be right back here buying a new one.
Rating: 
Summary: What a waste of money
Review: Creative Labs is a terrible company. They make an irresponsibly faulty product, and then back it up with... zero technical support! You heard me right, no tech support. I expected the arrival of my Nomad 3 unit with great anticipation (I hadn't read the reviews here), but out of the box I knew it was not going to be a pleasant experience. Unlike the iPod the content in the Nomad box was a mess, and the player is quite ugly in person. (Or is it "in machine"?) Transfering files is a nightmare. And it eats battery like a hog. OK, hogs don't eat batteries, but you get my point. It's on the way back.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: Easy to use menus, huge capacity battery last 11 hours!
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable Morons at Creative Labs
Review: Hi I have the Nomad Jukebox 3 40GB version for 2 years now. I must say this is the best Audio product I have ever had. I use it in the car and at work and really love its great sound. This week I wanted to buy an extra Nomad 3 for my girlfriend and guess what. They've replaced the Nomad 3... Can you believe that??? Their best product ever. They must be very very stupid.Creative start producing the NOMAD 3 again,,, please ...
Rating:
Summary: Lousy Design + Lousy Support = Lousy Product
Review: I bought the Nomad 3 to replace my 6GB Nomad Jukebox, which I loved but which became far too small for my 350+ collection of albums. On my old Nomad, I frequently accessed tracks by selecting the artist, and then, within the artist category, going to the sub-category of specific albums. I expected the Nomad 3 to function the same way. But it has LOUSY DESIGN and does not. Instead, when one "selects" a particular artist, the machine goes directly to a list of all of the tracks of that artist on the player. For my collection, which includes artists with as many as 8 or 9 cd's in the library, this process results in being presented with a list of 70-80 song titles, not the 8 or 9 albums, and it is simply unacceptable (especially since my old Jukebox had greater flexibility. On to LOUSY SUPPORT. When I discovered the player's limitations, I examined the manual to confirm that I wasn't doing something wrong and creating an easily correctible problem. The manual was unhelpful after I had printed it out (yes, the manual is provided only as a PDF file on the accompanying software disc, not as a printed booklet). So I decided to contact customer support and consulted the Creative website to get the number. The website discourages telephone calls for support and steers you towards communicating by e-mail.
I sent the e-mail request for support and received a nonsensical, completely unhelpful reply. So with reluctance, I dialed the toll (not toll-free) telephone number provided. After 25 minutes of dealing with cumbersome automated answering equipment and being placed on infinite hold (you call is important to uss...please wait for the next available representative), I spoke with a representative who told me (very politely) that he didn't really know much about the Nomad 3, because it was a new product. After getting an obviously (and patently) wrong answer to my inquiry, I asked to speak to another tech rep. I was told I would have to call back and wait on hold again. So I am both disappointed with the design and angry with the service. Perhaps I should also mention that the product is so poorly made that the headphone connection is loose with the result that the right headphone occassionally goes silent during play. You might think I would be unhappy about this. You would be wrong. Since the product has a "defect" and won't work, I am going to return it for a full refund.
Rating:
Summary: Failure to live up to potential.
Review: I have a 15,000 track, 23GB library of MP3 files. I got this thing yesterday and everything seemed to be going ok. However, after 10,054 files, the player neglects to write anything further to its hard drive. The controlling program on the computer, PlayCenter 3, shows that it is writing to the player but nothing is actually being written. I now have about 16,322MB of music on the drive. There is 21,811MB of free space! But the player won't use it! I was hoping that Creative would have gotten the bugs out of their product by now. I have a 20GB USB model from a couple of years ago that had similar problems as well as crashing itself, the USB port, and PlayCenter 2. It appears that they still haven't addressed their problems. If you read glowing recommendations about this product, they just haven't accumulated enough files yet. Their problems await the growth of their library. Absolutely cannot recommend this product!!
Rating: 
Summary: Innovation with flaws
Review: I have owned the Nomad 3 (40 GB) for a few months now and have praise for the innovations with a LiIon battery and a fat drive, the firewire/USB ports and the recording feature. However, there are significant drawbacks with this device that I believe have to do with human factors and make me look elsewhere for a better solution. In a nutshell, Creative's device is beautifully and innovatively engineered, but stupidly designed in terms of software, form factor and user interface, due to an apparent lack of usability awareness at Creative's design team. More specifically: - It is not possible without extra software to connect the player and simply use it as external harddisk, which is possible with most other players on the market - a major drawback.
- The player sometimes locks up and needs a reset or battery removal.
- Disk access is rather slow and playback typically incurs some startup delay.
- The bulky discman form of the player may make it familiar to nontechnical users but is neither handy nor practical. Several times I have almost dropped the player because of its rounded shape and placing it on a car console other than flat is not possible.
- The second battery options reminds of "razor-blade" extra moneymaking - why not make the device smaller or offer one large built-in battery?
- The jog wheel favors right-handed people - a crosshair or wheel-based user interface in the front middle would have been more practical - see ipod design.
- The recording feature is very limited - the input level is not variable and a mic input would have been essential.
- The PC software for the player is non-intuitive and the creation of playlists largely useless, because shuffle play cannot be chosen just for a specific playlist and applies by default only to all loaded songs.
- The currently played track is only shown when pressing the info button twice.
- The player plays by default only a single track in normal mode and then stops.
- The search feature is rather primitive, largely due to the low-res display. MP3/WMA (etc.) playback and recording on a high-capacity small-format player is a promising market and I do wonder how much longer it will take for companies to step beyond intentional "deficiency engineering" and present a compact device with an intelligent and practically designed user interface. Apple is closer in many terms but the lack of recording and copy capabilities makes the ipod a consumer toy rather than a tool.
Rating:
Summary: WOW!!! BEST PURCHASE I HAVE EVER MADE!!!!
Review: I just bought this thing from Amazon and all I can say is WOW!!!! This is probably the best purchase I have ever made. This thing is everything I ever expected and more!! It's easy to use as well - even my wife can operate it! I have to say, everyone out there who is thinking of buying this, stop thinking. I bought it and I am extremely happy with it the moment I powered this thing on. YOU ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY CANNOT GO WRONG WITH THIS PURCHASE! I GUARANTEE IT!!!
Rating:
Summary: Great player
Review: I love my NJB3. It's much better than its predecessor the NJB1. As long as you don't mind the relatively large size to other players (though it is still smaller than, say, a portable CD player), then there are many benefits including the fast transfer speed, long battery life, and large capacity for files. However, if you're thinking of buying one, check with the manufacturer for the correct list price....
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