I bought this as a replacement for my IPod Mini which after a year kept locking up and the earphone contacts were bad I decided upon the 2GB version as I never filled my 4GB Ipod up anyhow. It cost me just £100 on Amazon which as you can see is already cheaper than its rivals. I chose the black version.

I couldn't wait to get it up and running. There was no soaftware to install as I just plugged and played. I just opened the My Music folder and dragged and dropped the music into the players folder. I also learned how to copy JPEGS to be shown as album art on the player. You just type the name of the album you want art for in google images, and save the thumb nail (the smallest size) as AlbumArt Small. You then drag it into the folder with the rest of the songs. It is easier to have a folder for each album.

That aside, and on to using the player. It has easy to navigate menu's displayed in list form. It is like the Ipod as it was designed by the same person. All you do is press the touch sensitive up and down buttons lightly, and press harder the centre to select an option. To me, it was pretty self explanotary, and after selecting music and then the album name I was soon playing tunes. The sound was clear, and I thought the little picture of the albums looked cool on its large colour screen which is grainy but readable.

As for EQ settings: the 3D surround modes were dissapointing somewhat but if you are listening to cheap phones, the Jazz option provides more bass. Otherwise leave it to normal. It would have been alot better if it had a graphic EQ then you could adjust each tone individually, but hardly any MP3 players boast this feature.

Some other things I found really good about this player were the seperate volume control which means you can't knock it accidentally, as well as the dedicated reset button so you don't have to remember a combo of buttons in the event of a lock up. I think it sounds better than the Ipod in my opinion, as it sounds less harsh on the ears at high volumes with the right earphones. It's a flash based player so is faster to load and no moving parts means it won't go as bad as my Ipod did (in theory). You can also play WMA files, Microsofts standard compressed file format, which creates smaller files so you can add more songs. I had lots of these that I couldn't convert to MP3 through copy protection so couldn't add to my Ipod. Now I can have them all! This 2GB model stores about 400 higher quality MP3's.