If there's any love lost between Creative Labs and Microsoft over the latter company going ahead with its own MP3 player brand to compete with its own one-time partner, judging from today's announcement, it's hard to find out where it went. Creative picked this day -- right in front of an anticipated Microsoft announcement on its Zune device -- to roll out a widescreen version of its Zen player in North America.

Called the Zen Vision:W, some of its competitive advantages are a little more obvious than even Zune's. On first glance, it looks like a UMPC, though maybe a little stretched out, with a 4.3" TFT display using the "widescreen" 16:9 ratio. Launched in Korea two weeks ago, North America will get a 30 GB edition priced at $299.99 USD, and a 60 GB edition priced at $399.99 USD.

Creative is saying the 60 GB model can hold up to 240 hours of video, assuming that's all you store on it. The small print reveals this video would be encoded using MPEG-4 Simple Profile (SP) at 500 Kbps throughput. That's far from what you'd want to see on a big-screen TV, but for a presumably lower-resolution display, it's actually quite adequate.

The W does include AV outputs to a 480-line display (standard NTSC TV resolution), so how well its videos translate to a 20th century display, if not yet a 21st, remains to be seen.

Since Apple launched its video-capable iPod last year, multimedia analysts have been saying if any new portable media device has a chance to upset the iPod, it would have to give the consumer freedom and a download service on a par with iTunes. Surprisingly, Creative may be taking the best shot at this one-two punch we've seen from outside Apple thus far.

Like other Zen devices before it, the Vision:W will support multiple codecs: in this case, MPEG-1, -2, and -4 SP, along with DivX 4 and 5, XviD, and on top of that, TiVoToGo for transfer and display of files downloaded via TiVo. The Zen isn't locked into a single DRM scheme, enabling it to display a variety of videos that aren't just Hollywood films and repurposed reruns.

As for the #2 punch, Creative made sure the new Zen is fully compatible with Amazon's Unbox video download service. Already, Unbox is making available content from Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros., while iTunes today is limited to offerings from its Pixar-pal Disney, and Sony remains locked tight with its PlayStation Portable.

Although the PSP is certainly popular, its own PSP-centric derivative of MPEG-4 encoding is not exactly portable in its own right. If Creative can succeed in making media portability a must-have feature, it could use that to its advantage against both Apple and Sony.

Of course, like the iPod, the Zen Vision:W will house multiple JPEG images and, lest we forget, MP3 songs. Transfer between the W and the PC -- or possibly some cameras as well -- can take place via a USB 2.0 cable, or indirectly by way of its built-in Compact Flash memory reader. An optional adapter makes the CF reader compatible with SD, SmartMedia, and MultiMedia Card.

All this makes the W connective, but admittedly, what it lacks is the built-in networking features that will distinguish Microsoft's Zune, including the feature where one user can "DJ" songs to a handful of other Zunes in its immediate vicinity. But that kind of connectivity hasn't yet popped up on consumers' wish lists just yet - at least, not above, "Make the screen bigger," and, "Let me see what I want to see."

Add to all this the fact that Creative has buried the hatchet with Apple, letting it concentrate on product development rather than on legal proceedings. And with Apple having missed an opportunity, some say, to widen its own iPod screens to something closer to what we've seen in that company's patent applications, Creative could have its best shot in years to actually become the iPod contender - in some respects, even a better shot than does Microsoft.