After weeks of speculation, rumours and leaked pictures, Creative has unleashed its new iPod rival with some features heavily influenced by Microsoft's differently successful Zune player.

The new Creative Zen X-Fi comes with a 2.5in TFT screen and uses the company's Xtreme Fidelity X-Fi audio tech, currently found in its PC sound cards.

It sports an FM radio, built-in speakers, voice recording and an SD card slot to boost the available storage. Best of all it has Wi-Fi in one of the players so users can stream and download songs from the user's computer over a wireless network.

The technology can also be used to stream pictures and videos to the player.

The device also manages to improve the quality of the compressed music with its propriatary technology X-Fi Crystalizer, which it claims will restore during playback the highs and lows that are lost when music is ripped to MP3, WMA or AAC formats.

"We're very excited to achieve this breakthrough of adding our X-Fi audio technology to a ZEN player, setting the highest standard in audio quality for portable music players," says Craig McHugh, president and COO of Creative.

"Some of the top recording artists in the music industry are very outspoken about the poor quality of digital music. We addressed this issue by inventing X-Fi technology, which restores the quality of music that is lost during the digital ripping process. Now for the first time ever we've been able to implement this technology in a ZEN."

The ZEN X-Fi with Wireless LAN is available in 32GB and 16GB versions, while the ZEN X-Fi is available with 8GB of memory.

More details here.

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