I bought an Apple iPod 80gig and I would assess it as "ok" - certainly a nice screen and better sound than I had read about.

Problem is I much prefer the WMP interface over the itunes one which to me is a total piece of crap in comparison. Which would have been fine but for whatever reason incomprehensible to me - all of the lossless compression of a lot of my CD's on the computer has to be converted "again" through the itunes program before it will install on the ipod. If I try to get the songs from another computer it tells me it will only allow for that if I delete everything on the ipod - so essentially you are tied to recording to the ipod from one and only one computer.

Yes there is a way around it but certainly no instructions for it from Apple.

My old flash disk Sandisk was far easier as it works likes a hard drive and read practically every music file type. Simpley right click on the folder and say send to "drive E Sandisk" and poof your music is there ready to play. Plus it used one single AAA battery that lasted 30 hours. Run out of power stick a new battery in - it is less than half the size and weight of the Apple.

Problem? 512mb capacity though it does take SD cards. To me this system was far better if they could have increased the size capacity I preferred it overall to the Apple.

I wish the Apple had a USB output which would be nice to get rid of some of the grunge and connect up to the Total Bithead headphone amp/DAC or the bigger but still portable tube headphone amp and Dac from Trends.