In reply to:

The Creative and iRiver player offerings are suppose to be pretty good too.

The S/O just got a Creative (MuVo 512MB) I played with it a bit... seems pretty cool so far... she power walks with it, the menus seem pretty straightforward to me, but I've also never used an iPod so I can't compare.

Nowhere near the same capacity on hers, though... 512MB, does WMA and MP3, and doubles as a flashdrive if need be. (It just ignores unplayable files in directories)

Bren R.