Recommend me a MP3/PMP

[korn469]

I'm looking to buy a mp3 player soon, so I'd thought I'd get recommendations before I bought anything. Here's what I'm looking for:

*I primarily want to listen to music on it, though if it plays video that's a nice plus.
*Good battery life
*good music quality
*works with rhapsody (or a zune or ipod if any unlimited music plans exists for them) but thisn't isn't a must
*flash based
*less than 250 (the 8gb ipod touch would be the most expensive thing i would buy but I'm not sure if it's what I'd like or not)

So what mp3/pmp devices doyou own, what do you like or dislike about them, and what do you recommend?

[snoopy369]

The iPod Touch is amusing, but if you want better battery life, the last generation iPod Nanos worked quite well and the battery lasted for quite a while, at least for me. Whether the current version's batteries are as good, no idea.

[Locutus]

I love the iRiver Clix 2 myself. It has a gorgeous design (both hardware and software) and one of the easiest to use interfaces I've ever seen -- my parents had no trouble whatsoever learning it, and after 15 years they still have trouble programming their own VCR. (Mind you, there are no buttons on the front but rather the entire front acts as a giant four-way button, which feels a bit weird at first, like it's breaking off, but you get over that very quickly.)

The quality of both the sound and the video is truly excellent -- use your own headphones though if you want to take full advantage of that (the ones that come with the device are decent enough, but not as good as a proper Sennheiser or Shure). The device is fairly small so it's not great for full-length video, but the quality of the AMOLED screen is spectacular.

To me, the best part is that it has an amazing feature set, with support for just about every audio file type under the sun (including Rhapsody and Audible), it supports MPEG4 and WMV9 video, JPEGs and even TXT files (the small screen is not really suitable for reading long texts, but in a pinch it's useful for storing notes). It has an FM tuner and recorder, a voice recorder (sadly no line-in though), good equaliser, alarm clock, calendar and it even supports Flash games (with a bunch of nice free games available either out-of-the-box or online -- hardly beats a DS though). Great battery life as well, easily 20+ hours.

The 8GB version should fit right into your price range.

[CrONoS]

http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2008/12/top-5-mp3-players-of-2008.php