The player has arrived, and so far, it's not bad at all. I'm going to do a full review but I'm using that as an excuse to put together a proper website for one of my domains that I have hosting for. It may take some time so here's the basic info.
It's the Safecom unit, it comes in their packaging.
It's very small, measuring 54mm x 23mm x 23mm. It doesn't weigh much either even with the battery in.
It looks decent but the plastic ends spoil it.
It doesn't need the driver, which is a good thing for those not so tech savvy as the CD that came with it was a mess and won't read.
You can use it as a pen drive very easily the only difference is you have to go through a couple of menus rather than it just being plug-and-go. The manual says you don't even need a battery in it for this use but I haven't tested that yet.
Transfer rates are almost bang on 1MB/sec so only USB 1.1 rates despite the claim that it is USB 2.0. For a 1GB unit though, unless you swap out all your mp3s regularly, this isn't a big problem. It takes about 1 min to transfer an album.
Sound quality is very reasonable. Noise level could be a bit lower but I'm a fussy sod and am happy to live with it so I'd guess most people won't notice it at all. I tried it with some £15 Sony earbuds and it sounded quite reasonable. The phones it comes with aren't too bad but I would have to replace them (I have some Shure E2c phones on the way). Just for fun I plugged in my Sennheiser HD580s. I had to turn the volume up near max (that's when I noticed the noise level mentioned earlier) and it actually sounded not bad at all. I would think the battery life would be greatly reduced though.
Overall, for £35 (inc delivery) above what I would have paid for a 1GB flash drive, I think it's a bargain.