I've been doing research on the topic for half a year or so, it's a lot of money after all. It all comes down to your needs and tastes (and budget, naturally), so you'd better look at the specs (and check whether they can be trusted, because it's not always the case), otherwise people tend to recommend theirs. I was leaning towards the iRiver, but the fact it has toooons of features I'll never, ever use, not even to see if they work (voice recording and especially in-line recording, which to me is just stupid) made me change my mind.
The iPod is out of the question for autonomy issues (it's an issue to me) and pricing (and because I'm a Win/Linux guy as almost everyone in Europe) and I don't like the Zen, I've hold them all and it's just too bulky and heavy (IMO). It's cheap though, and people I know say the sound is great.
In the end I bought a Rio Karma. I'm very satisfied, can't live without it and so on. I had to return the first one because it came with a slighty jammed stick (the red nipple, take a look at the pictures) but haven't had any other major issue (one lock-up, if so). There's people complaining about hard-drives dying but never happend to me, and I'm not even worried about it because I got a very good deal from an Austrian company (I live in Germany now): 300 (euro) with a two-year warranty from Rio and a three-year warranty from the seller. No FM-radio, no voice recording, no inline recording, damn, you can't even use it as a plug-and-play hard drive (though it's said it will be adressed through firmware). On the other hand it's intended to play music and is really good at it: good sound (though every DAP sounds good I guess), 5-band customizable equalizer (three of them, plus default ones), on-the-fly playlist generation, a cool RioDJ which shuffles, plays new music and so on, and and a navigation system using ONLY id-tags which I absolutely love (to hell with folder navigation). And for me the biggest plus were the forums (riovolution.com) where you can actually TALK with Rio engineers. Problems are addressed, and new firmware is released quite often and actually works. It lacks a remote and a case (just a pouch), but surprisingly I found out I can live without them: the remote just adds bulk and I don't need the case, I keep it in my pocket with a especially-made screen-protector.
I'm not sure whether that's what you need (probably not) but what the heck, my two cents.
PS. I was a newcomer ('petardo') in the old forums, my last thread was about web hosting. If you finally signed with SurpassHosting how's it going? I've managed to delay my possible server move for a while.
Woohoo, my longest post ever.
