Price Paid:  $150.00 from Circuit City

Summary:
This was my first MP3 player and I love it! Mine had 64MBs storage, it holds about 16, 128 bitrate songs. Its super easy to use, I've only had one problem with it so far. My opinion, if your looking for your first MP3 player and don't want to spend alot of money, get this player.

Strengths:
Easy to use, good battery life, nice playback, good tech support, and fairly fast transfers via USB.

Weaknesses:
Hard to use controls with the protective case on it, expensive memory upgrades,and very proprietary.

Similar Products Used:
This is my first player, I've never used anything similar.

Price Paid:  $30.00 from ebay

Summary:
I got a refurbished rio 600 for a song on ebay. Previously I've been using a Riovolt sp100 mp3 CD player, but I found it skips a bit when exercising, so I wanted a solid state player for cheap. 32MB onboard isn't much, but when I convert to WMA, I find that I can fit 68 min. of music on it, which isn't too bad. The sound quality is good, and while the display is small, I love how informative it is.

Strengths:
Sound quality, portability, quality construction and design.

Weaknesses:
bundled software (realjukebox) is just ok, and it doesn't even allow you to convert to WMA, which the player can use. Get dbpoweramp from download.com - it's great and it's free.

Similar Products Used:
riovolt sp100

Price Paid:  $60.00 from jungle.com

Summary:
RIO 600
I Really like this product despite some of its little faults. Its small, neat and fairly sturdy. Have dropped the unit a couple of times but no damage occured.
I purchased the unit mainly to listen to audio books downloaded from the net. And i can manage to get up to 10 hours of spoken work using only the 32meg onboard. So this suits me just fine. Great price too, only £60 + £4 p&p

Strengths:
sound quality, ease of use, battery life

Weaknesses:
battery meter is useless and inaccurate.
Joy pad is no joy, you can only use this whilst looking at it! The desktop software needs some tweeking and searching.
Headphones! YUK! very uncomfortable and fiddly to put

Price Paid:  $0.00

Summary:
good for the fist t3 months,..i've bought 3, lost two, but they do degrade and fall apart after the first few months if you use them everyday...not a rugged design, but it works and gets loud enough...after 5 months it stopped working; said i had to upgrade..that sucks for a HARDWARE product

Strengths:
looks

Weaknesses:
quality control,..rugedness

Similar Products Used:
rio 800..2 other 600's, and an old rio 300 when mp3's weren't known popularly..

Price Paid:  $99.00 from Comet

Summary:
I found this player to be pretty neat and
quite stylish whilst being very practical. Since this was the last in my area from Comet I got a deal on it for roughly £99. I'd recommend buying a new pair of headphones though because the ones which come with it are uncomfortanle and too much of a hassel to wear.

Strengths:
Stlyish, practical, can withstand being dropped and good sound quality.

Weaknesses:
Standard memory is too low, battery guage is very inacurate, Rio software took some playing around with to get working.

Similar Products Used:
None.