Does Creative (Our national IT Icon) produce anything good?

[afbug]

I got a travel sound a few years back. Very good and compact. :thumbsup: Their EP630 earphones are very popular too.

 

[KTi]

Creative is a big name in the international scene but actually it still has a long way to go if it wants to grow in strength. There are areas that it needs to improve on. A year ago, I bought a Zen Micro and I wasn't impressed from the onset. To start with, the set came with a pathetic instruction manual which was only about less than 10 pages and in a few different langauges. The instructions were very basic and no detail explanations on each function. In the end, I threw the manual away and learnt to use the various function thru trial and error. After a few months, the set broke down and I was in for a shock when I sent it to their service centre for repair. The place looked so much like a store room with a lot of part and boxes strewn all over the place. The air-con was down and customers had to sit on chairs that were no different from whose u see at funeral wake. There was a spillover and some customers had to sit on the chairs place along the corridor. The customer service officers called out the number and if u happened to sit outside and failed to hear it, then you miss ur turn. They didn't bother to check with those outside. I was told that they had been operating from there (in that kind of condition???) and would be shifting to another centre. I emailed to Creative about my unhappiness with the product and their customer support and all I got was a standard reply stating that they noted my points and would get back to me. That was the last I heard from them. Support local products and buy another Creative? Not for me. My Zen Micro is giving me problems again.

Give Creative another chance, the new store at HQ now has bigger space for customer service and if you work around Suntec/Marina Sq area, you could also have your product seriviced there

 

[wind30]

Ultimately, I think they need their own product and not play chase in the mp3 market.

I think creative was the first to enter the mp3 market. Correct?

 

[mercurial_streak]

Their speakers r cheap, powerful n gd. But for MP3 players, sound quality so-so.......qc veri the lousy........but if u send ur mp3 player for repairs and they happen not to have spare part, they will actually offer a one-to-one exchange wif a new one or ask u to top up abit of money to upgrade to a better one.

 

[user111]

creative sux

lolz :bsmilie:

 

[Hoky]

creative sux

lolz :bsmilie:

Although our home brand, I have to say it pretty sucks much.
They have outsourced too many of their designs to ODM and manufacturing to third parties.

And their industrial and product design of not of standard too.
Look at the aesthetics, and quality compared to Apple. (Talking about the Zen range of MP3 which I do find that it looks the bit good at all.)

Here’s a comment from my friend which I found funny from my friend:
Apple only makes 2 colors of Ipod, back and white.
Creative on the other hand has “a lot of patterns”, trying to attract people with fancy designs.
Who’s making more money now?

 

[glennyong]

i say the QC is ok. but my Audigy 2 and 6.1 speakers are beginning to die.... in my first year of owning my 6.1 in the year 2000, i changed the speakers and subwoofers twice. not because i blasted it, it just fails suddenly.

and now.. both starting to fail,extremely slow response in sound level tuning... i move the knob abit, its either super loud or super soft...

so i gotta tune it super loud in the afternoon, and tune it via windows sound mixer so it wun be too loud....

it gets irritating sometime, and now its expensive to have it serviced anyway. so i gotta live with it...

 

[glennyong]

Although our home brand, I have to say it pretty sucks much.
They have outsourced too many of their designs to ODM and manufacturing to third parties.

And their industrial and product design of not of standard too.
Look at the aesthetics, and quality compared to Apple. (Talking about the Zen range of MP3 which I do find that it looks the bit good at all.)

Here’s a comment from my friend which I found funny from my friend:
Apple only makes 2 colors of Ipod, back and white.
Creative on the other hand has “a lot of patterns”, trying to attract people with fancy designs.
Who’s making more money now?

well... why compare Western and Oriental designs. both have different target markets. Apple's design is more of a revolutionary design to revive its dying system. and now it has made a big hit and big return. different i must say.

Creative on the other hand, has a different market target against local and overseas consumers, having different looking products to inspire individuality and allow each individual consumer to express his/her own fashion statement.

Both companies are different in their own way. Creative is also making $ in their sound cards and speakers.

Apple is making money from both Macs and iPods. but come to think of it. there are more PCs den Macs in the world. Creative have set a standard in PC audio, and i believe most PCs now have a "Creative" in them. and i believe many out there in the world Do Not own a Mac. but Apple have dominated in iPod by making it working with Windows, it has started to dominate in the portable music industry.

well.. my 2cents..
different directions by different companies ... :dunno:

 

[shojibake]

Well creative has posted a quarterly loss of 114mil, while apple surges ahead. The entire era of creative having a lead in the low end consumer soundcard market is long gone. Even they themselves believed it was a dead end.

The only thing that creative seems good at, besides the mp3 players, is the range of emu soundcards geared toward professional recording. Even then, the ugliness surrounding soundblaster still manages to create some doubt.

In my mind the creative line suffers so much from over diversification.

 

[glennyong]

In my mind the creative line suffers so much from over diversification.

agreed. thats the problem for being bao sua bao hai...

from soundcards and speakers to PCs to graphic cards to mp3 players to pmc players, pc accessories.. its too much things i believe.

Blaster PC proved to be a failure big time. followed by its range of Voodoo graphic cards.

 

[MUSTANGPC]

Now before I share my experiences, ask yourself did you ever get anything from Creative that you are satisfy?

In the days when you have to buy sound-card separately, I found their product to be good. I stop buying sound-card when most mainboards have their own embedded sound chip. I purchased a Creative ATI graphic card when it first came out and this one still working fine. I have no complain. Sometime, when you are out of luck, you may get one of those defective product - tough luck! It happens once in a while. Otherwise, Creative has uphold their end of the bargain - reliability. Good luck Creative.

 

[rainman]

It's all abt the product image problem and the originality. Technology no longer plays the most impt part in these IT gadgets.

Look at IPOD, what's so great abt it? Other than it looks better than its competitors' products, the fact is it's bulkier than alot of mp3 players.

Anyway it's sad to hear that our Creative is losing its stand.

 

[pokiemon]

creative has come a long way to become where they are today however where they are today is a far cry from where they were few years ago. an indication of this is in their share price. they tried to compete with apple by differentiating their products - functionality e.g radio, to give consumers value for their money. apple on the other hand spends their r&d on asthetic because they know this is what the market wants and are willing to pay for it. also, by competing base on functionality, creative is not competing against apple but against the other brands like korea and china. and these korean and chinese products are sold at a fraction of creative's price. so unfortunately they are fighting two losing battles. they need to find their niche or focus on their money making business. enough said...back to downloading songs for my ipod.

 

[Maltese]

wow...it seems that there are far more victims than I expected...do you know that Creative staffs are victims of their product as well?

Going back to my case, I called their tech support line throughout the 3rd day I bought the prodikey and none actually gets through!!! I have at least made 8 phone calls with at least 2 waiting up to 30 minutes! After leaving SEVERAL voice mails, they finally called after 7.30pm. I spoke to the person that I have done everything on my part like upgrading my drivers, called up Dell and search for forums and the conclusion is - this hardware simply works this way.


The interesting part is that Creative does not allow refund or exchanging to another items. You can only send in faulty items to be serviced but cannot do any exchange. So I told the man who called me I will insist that they change to something else for me because its not my fault that I've purchased a lousy product - mind its not a faulty unit, its a faulty product that has been successfully launched into the market.

I then ask that guy frankly, if I were to upgrade my item, which one is worth it. I was thinking of throwing another $200 to get a 7.1 speakers which my PC is capable of supporting but it can't support a midi 32 key piano cum keyboard! For those who don't know about prodikey, its basically just a normal keyboard with some piano keys below. And the sound they make is simply not demanding at all. To my surprise he told me not to get them because they are not worth to pay for that price. If I wanted to, he ask me to wait till the sale in June. I sort of got the hint that its just not worth it to pay this kind of price for their product.

Forget to mention that when no one can help me out, I did a search on the net and was referred to 2 very interesting forums. One is from Dell the other from Creative. The dell forum mention one guy wanted to sue Dell because he spend so much on a new PC and bought a PS/2 card to use a creative musical keyboard but it just don't work! The creative forum listed all the angry creative products buyer and some even mention not to buy or if you buy it, throw or give up on making it work. The best part is that Creative does not even bothers to hear what their supporters are complaining about and help them. It just tells me that Creative themselves are not able to solve this problem as well.


I was then hopeless and return to the showroom to change my prodikeys. While testing out, the service guy and myself both heard that there is something wrong with the keys while playing...I told the person that's one of the faults and guess what, the staff told me helplessly that its always been like that. He had, unfortunately, bought a set for himself also and he have to live with it.

Oh forget to mention, the second day after I bought the set and complained about the time lag(one of the faults) while playing it, the service guy actually told me to get a $129 sound card to facilitate my $69 muscial keyboard. I ask him is there something wrong with him or what? Why should I buy more expensive accessories to supplement my cheap main hardware? And somemore before I buy, they assured me repeatedly that my PC (which is brand new, dual core Pentium D) will be good enough. I just dunno what to comment about their sales, technical, customer, QC and management level.

I end up topping another $20 to get a $89 headphone only to find out that it sounds much much much worst than my 15 year old $30 sony headphone which I have been throwing around throughout all these years.

What can I say?

 

[mattlock]

well... why compare Western and Oriental designs. both have different target markets. Apple's design is more of a revolutionary design to revive its dying system. and now it has made a big hit and big return. different i must say.

Creative on the other hand, has a different market target against local and overseas consumers, having different looking products to inspire individuality and allow each individual consumer to express his/her own fashion statement.

sorry, what? I didn't know there was a difference between western and oriental markets.
what, oriental markets like shitty designs and bad quality?

you're telling me that having stupid drawings on a Creative MP3 player equals to individuality?grin.

 

[lippie]

I never thought of it as "Our National IT Icon"....

Unless they prove themselves really creative in their products... :think:

 

[user12343]

their speakers designed by cambridge soundworks is still ok...

 

[user12343]

Sim Wong Hoo would be sad to read all this

 

[poh6702]

Creative is like IOMEGA (if you still remember) they did well becasue they had once a very inovative products.

Creative started with Sound cards and they made alots of money, that was the main reason the company grow.

Iomega started with ZIP drives, its sales of ZIP drives once went up to US$7Billion per year and made alots of money, now that ZIP drive is outdated technology, and they don't have a replacement, the company went down the hill.

Ionative ideas doesn't come easily, now that sound card is no more the cash cow of Creative, they have to look for another Inovative product, Creative put the bet on MP3 and portable Video products, but unfortunitely they lose out to Apple IPOD. Apple is always one step ahead of Creative.

 

[yanyewkay]

I think creative was the first to enter the mp3 market. Correct?

dun think so. It was a china brand name IIRC in the late 90s. I had like 32 or 64mb ram and costed ~$300 and was rather bulky.