extremelydodgy
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jason5_k said:well here is one mp3 player to consider: the Sony NW-A3000, if like me you can't possible see why your mp3 player needs a colour screen or why anyone would be prepared to watch videos of such a small screen (hey just my opinion, dont flame me, please Lol) then its great, lack of colour=longer battery life. Navigation is good (granted it isnt quite the ipods wheel but still very easy) its also got a host of handy search features, artist link and intelligent shuffle are good, I thought they were pointless features but you will find yourself using them. And the price? £144 from ebay they were going for as low as £115 on ebay too but that sounded a bit dodgy to me
The screen made me go crosseyed and it's way less legible than an iPod even not factoring in Photo/Video functions. The UI is slower. Battery life is a few hours longer than the iPod - not double as advertised, and it's considerably bulkier. It does have a decent EQ, as you say the artist link facilities, etc are good (but then so are smartlisting functions on the iPod) and it's gapless provided you use the completely proprietary ATRAC file format. A half-decent option with prices as they are these days if you can't stretch to an iPod.
A real budget option apart from the Archos if you can still hunt them down is the iRiver H10. Some places have them for less than 100 for even the 20gb model. When they were released a year and a half ago they were a total disaster despite the hardawre being not bad. The firmware was just totally up the spout and the bundled software was utterly abysmal. But now with firmware upgrades they're pretty much as usable as any other non-iPod DAP. No fancy features such as OTG playlists, but you do get a radio + recording and pretty respectable voice recording (e.g. both features are notably better than the Zen Vision M despite the age of this model). Sound is respectable and there's a EQ, SRS and all the other things that crap up the sound but people love. The 20Gb models work with Windows Media Player and other MTP software only. The 6Gb models can be converted between MTP and UMS. Battery life of the smaller-capacity models is not spectacular but the cell is removable. The 20Gb has fair battery life on a par with the current iPod and has non removable batteries.