sweet

i wanted a cheap flash mp3 player with sd expansion to use while skiing so it wouldnt skip like hard drive players would when taking a beating on the moguls. this limited me to the rio forge (rio went out of buisness you can forget getting your warrentee honored or whatever), panasonic dsnap (ridiculously priced for what you get) and some $5 no name ones from ecost.com, or of course, the sansa e100 series.i read reviews saying the sound wasnt good, which discouraged me before i realized the reviews only meant with the included headphones. which DO in fact, suck. theyre comfortable, but they suck. i got my player at circuit city for 75 bucks, i rarely buy from them because they jack the prices up, but in this case, it was cheap. consider what you get...
1gb integrated AND expansion slot. go to ecost.com and get a 1gb sd card for about 25 bucks, and you have yourself a 2gb player for a total of 100 bucks, cheaper than,say, the ipod nano, by 100 bucks for something that has an fm radio and weighs the same. or you could buy a 2gb card for 60 on ecost and you have a 3gb player. makes sense, right? and you can carry extra sd cards with you like you would cds, except sd cards are the size of postage stamps, and thats much more convenient, if you ask me.

k, trying to keep from rambling... when i unpacked it (grrr one of those annoying hard plastic sealed cases that are a pain to open), i was immediately suprised at the weight. it felt so light it was like holding a plastic shell, with no internal components. so light. the AAA battery didnt add much weight, either. conveniently, it comes with the battery, which is just plain nice of them. youre all excited when you get it and wouldnt it be a disappointment if you didnt have a AAA battery handy to try it out? anyhow, im used to hard drive players. i also have a creative zen vision:m (which is great if you want a hdd player, by the way). this is a feather in comparison to hard drive players.

now, turning it on. easy enough to figure out how to use it right away. the scroll wheel knob is for volume and navigation. if your fingers are greasy or sweaty it might be tricky to get a firm grip on the wheel to turn it. but otherwise its fine. it displays artist, song, album, time elapsed and time left, track number, and battery life. a lot of info for a small screen, but it doesnt look cluttered. nice. the backlight works really well, clear to read. the buttons are tactile. i guess you could say that cus the player is lightwegiht, it feels flimsy, but it doesnt really. it feels fine. the fm radio works suprisingly well, i picked up a lot of stations in the spectrum,more than I expected, and they came in well. not the same bass response youd get from an mp3, but not staticy at least. so that made me kinda happy. the reception is actually better than on my creative zen vision:m. totally suprising. k. a cool feature is that it gives you options to play new music that youve added to the player within the last day, week, and month. it lets you view mp3s by song, artist, or album. it comes with covers for the sd slot and for the usb input, but they arent connected and you will lose them but whatever you dont need them anyways, no other mp3 players have covers over the usb inputs. theres also a hold switch.

so basically, its small,incredibly lightweight, easily upgradable to 1.5, 2, or 3 gb, great sound with a decent pair of phones, easy to navigate, good fm.

for 75 bucks, theres nothing better you can buy. personally, i would not buy a flash player without the upgradability of sd