Price Paid:  $300.00 from amazon.com

Summary:
I love having all of my music with me at all times for travel and just other times when i want to hook my music up to someone else's system. The main reason for purchasing this unit is the ability to use my pre-amp to do the digital to analog conversion instead of in the unit itself.

Strengths:
optical out. design, size, battery life

Weaknesses:
does not support wma with drm, clunky user interface, some software bugs

Similar Products Used:
iPod, archos

Price Paid:  $289.00 from Iriver website

Summary:
Beats Ipod hands down. Borrowed my friends Ipod and was a waste of time. Iriver has got to advertise this bad boy. I use it almost every day. Basically stop reading this and go buy it

Strengths:
Are you kidding me ? 20 gig hard drive!! over 5000 song capacity. OGG audio , Mp3 , Wav , even video and pictures. It is basically a 20gig hard drive for anything. I use it for my video productions as an extra microphone. So its also a digital recorder. It also has a FM tuner built in. Super fast usb 2.0 transfers of everything, has good search and play features and it looks sleek.
Battery life is amazing and recharge is better. Added inline remote and leather case free. you dont get any of that from the Pod.

Weaknesses:
Honestly , I cant really think of any but the lack of publicity. If they would just make a commercail everyone would see. the one weakness I guess is that I had to reset it like 4 times so far but i dont know why that happened

Similar Products Used:
Ipod and Samsung napster thingy