Zen Stone Dead

A long time companion of mine on work day commutes was the wonderful Zen Stone MP3 player made by Creative. I had two of them (see below), an early 1GB version with no screen and a later model with 4GB and a rudimentary blue and black LCD screen.

They were so good I wrote a .net application that would subscribe to podcasts, query for new episodes and sync MP3s across to the device, nice new content ready for the next day's commute.

I found them both today and wondered if they would still work. One will attach to the USB and light up so that you can see what the internal drive last had on it, the other won't even do that. Neither of them function as MP3 players any more. How sad.