Price Paid:  $0.00

Summary:
I've used the Imation RipGO! for a few months now and even though it's construction is very solid it clearly has several design flaws. The most notable is that it's performance is completely unreliable. It will skip and/or abort songs in the middle of playing them even when sitting on a countertop and is even less reliable if one is in motion. It seems to have absolutely no physical shock protection and relies on reloading the same MP3 song in again and again and starting from the beginning. Also, with iadio CD's it will simply stop playing with even the slightest disturbance to the player. This seems to be a characteristic of most MP3 CD players I've tried and this unit is as awful as any of even the cheapest of such units. It's ability to do 180-210 MB CD-R backups is a cute feature but that alone does not justify the cost of this unit. If they added the ability to use CD-RW disks like their competition then that ability would be greatly enhanced since one could do daily backups of important files from their laptop and that alone would justify the cost. Other units allow you to do so unlike this unit. More such units are coming out every month and I expect they will also support CD-RW unlike Imation's product. Some day Panasonic might release a something from their Shockwave series that has MP3, I hope. I'd recommend you wait for such a unit before bothering with buying a MP3 CD player. Most units stink and this one is one of the worst yet despite it's use of metal parts instead of the cheap plastic of alternate choices.

Strengths:
Can do data backups to 80mm CD-R disks using a USB connection.

Weaknesses:
No shock absorption of ANY kind. Lack of ability to support CD-RW media.

Similar Products Used:
Rio Volt and Classic's CM415, both also skipped or aborted playing.