As mentioned previously, having played with an iPod, I’m quite impressed with where the technology is. However, I rarely jump into a new tech gadget without doing -some- research first, and man have I been doing research on portable media players. One of the better sites I’ve found (commercial wise) is Advanced MP3 Players. They have a fairly wide range of flash and disk based players, and have the base specs on each one. The more I consider my needs (wants?), I think it would be beneficial to have a player that doesn’t need the music and graphics to be added with a dedicated app like iTunes – this is important for me because I rarely boot Windows XP on the laptop.
Oh well, I get to ponder some more, as I need to put my money towards things like a new boiler for the house.