In the next couple days, I’m going to buy a portable MP3 player. Currently I’m leaning in the direction of Pioneer’s eXpanium MP3CD player. I really prefer to encode my MP3s at 256kbs rather than 128kbs, so the flash memory-based MP3 players are out of the question. I like the eXpanium’s ability to play both MP3 CD-Rs and regular CDs — the only real drawback I’ve read about is the inability of the eXpanium to display the MP3 ID tags in its LCD screen. That sucks, but still its a pretty good unit for $200 (and the only such unit on the market today, to my knowledge, that doesn’t max out at 192kbs).
Another MP3 player that’s been getting a lot of good press is the Nomad Jukebox from Creative Labs. This is basically a 6 gig. hard drive in a portable CD-player style body. It’s a lot more than the Expanium at $500, but my real concern is how well it would hold up under serious use. Most reviewers say it doesn’t have too many problems with skipping, but I have serious questions about how long a hard drive-based mechanism can stand say a daily 3-5 mile run. I’ve had enough problems with hard drives going flaky that were in gingerly-treatedy laptops; unless they’ve got some serious technology I don’t know about, I’d think this thing would be toast within 6 months given the way I’d probably use and abuse it.