Sony NW-E105PS
I'm using this little critter for almost a year. It's hard for me to compare it to other players sold at the same time, because I haven't tried any. I can tell you, however, that this is a fine piece of electronics, if not without flaws. On the other hand, had it no flaws, it would be much more expensive. I bought it for $100 in a local PC Richards electronics store. Right now it sells for $90 at Amazon.com. To be honest, I expected it to drop in price more than that, but there you go.
The good: The player is very light, and small, and the shape is round so it's easy to fit anywhere. You can use a piece of small cord to keep it hanging like a necklace. If it drops (and let's face it, sometimes they do drop) - it survives. It had a couple of drops so far and it's good as new. The only damage so far is that the 'psyc' writing on the front is gone. The buttons that show skip ahead, back and play signs are painted on the underside of the rocking panel, so they can't go anywhere. Another key 'good' thing is that batteries last almost forever. Manual claims that under certain usage pattern, one AAA will last for 70 hours. I haven't tested that, of course, but it sounds close enough to truth. That's pretty amazing, if you think about it. This makes it possible to use rechargable batteries comfortably; of course they do last much less time that that, but if you keep three of them around (if your recharger can charge only 2 at a time), you'll be fine, just like I am. Another neat thing is that You can have multiple playlists in the player. There is a slider button on the side that switches between hold, normal play and 'switch playlists' mode. It's more than a little awkward way to do this, but it's better than nothing. I'd prefer, naturally, to have a separate button that switches playlists, because you wouldn't want to have too many of them, anyway, but I can appreciate what they were trying to do.
What happens is that when you slide the button in top position to switch playlists, you want immediately to go back to be able to switch tracks - and that's a bit of a chore because if you push it too far, it will go into hold mode. If you push it back too far, it will again go into playlist switching mode. This is something you really want to look at the player when you're doing this..
It looks like I somehow went from good to the bad, not intending to. But that's fine, let's continue with 'bad' things. The software is crap. It hassled me in many little annoying ways many times now. It's always painfully slow. It plays an annoying, jarred sound that you can't turn off. It always skips while playing that same sound, which does not make it more audibly palatable.
It won't let you just copy the files in explorer to it and play it. That is, you can copy files and they will be stored there, and you can carry them somewhere, but you won't be able to play them on the thing.
It also forces you to authenticate before you can download files from a different system. Here's how it works: if I have computers at home and at work, it will let me get songs from pc at home, but when I try to download songs from pc at work, it will say that it can't do that unless I *DELETE* all songs on the player, and only then will be able to copy them over. That is, unless I authenticate it on both systems. Authentication didn't work for me, the program would just get frozen trying to authenticate. Later on I got it to work somehow, but I didn't need to use that functionality, so perhaps if you do need this much, you'll be able to force it to do that after some effort.
One other small gripe is that buttons on the bottom side, the ones that change playback mode, enter options menu (there's two buttons there), are very tiny and are sunk into the base, so that they're almost impossible to press with finger, you have to use nails. It really takes a transcendent effort to press it with a finger. It's fairly hard to press it with a nail, too.
Yet another problem is that it won't play all mp3s. I can't say exactly what it will choke on, it may be frequency, or bitrate, or the file not being stereo. It's not that easy to figure out the 'good' settings because they spell them out on the packaging (so do keep it around). However, if you have a 'motley' collection from various sources, or if you have a huge collection encoded at a given setting which won't work for it, that's a very annoying discovery after buying the thing. Fortunately, you can select all mp3s and right click on them and choose to convert to Sony ATRAC mode, which is simlilar to mp3 format. One thing to keep in mind, is that after conversion you need to delete all files from SonicStage playlist (SS is the player's pc-side software), then import them again from converted files, which you'll have to hunt down first, and that ain't easy either.
Yet another problem is that some relatively low bitrate mp3s, like for example 128 or lower or even some at 160kbps, will sound just lousy. You really have to either use ATRAC or go to 160-192 kbps. This is again a big problem with a 'motley' collection. So, beware.
For me, all the advantages outweigh the disadvantages of the player. Sometimes I do wonder, if I could make a better choice. It's hard to say but at the same time I'm happy I bought this player, because it's much better to have this than to have nothing at all.