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118 of 119 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
simply brilliant, 15 April 2005
My wife bought me this for Christmas- I am very pleased I married her!
In summary:The 40g version is the same as the 20g, maybe 1 or 2 mm thicker, but even then this is small enough and looks pretty cool. Unlike the iPod I've had no problems with scratches. The machine sounds superb, better than iPod, and after all you buy these things to listen to music (don't you?), as good as a portable CD player, and through my car stero sounds great, even fed through a casette adaptor. Unlike some I've had no problems with the software and no crashes of the unit except when trying to load tracks when the battery was low. It's all very easy to use. The only glitch is that it will occassionally go into "random" mode- this may be me being clumsy and catching the random button before I lock the unit. No matter, menus are easy to navigate back to where you want to be. The battery life (a big reason for buying this over iPod) is excellent and as good as claimed. No problems there at all. The random button is a great feature- you can choose random on the whole library, on specific genres or on individual artists or just an album. This is a fun way of rediscovering your collection although I never put it on the classical genre- hearing just one aria or a single movement makes no sense to me but for jazz and pop it's great. The built in EQ settings are extremely useful although I tend to use the custom setting, especially for use in the car, the main time I use the machine, and I can get the sound just about perfect. I've also played it through PC speakers and the Sony SRS T-70 portable active speaker system, again it sounds great (quite impressive speakers incidentally) when I've been away. Only gripe is the touch sensitive pad for navigation is way to sensitive and behaves erratically when battery power is low- the rest of the time it's fine and works well. Capacity is huge, enough even for a musophile like me. I've got >4000 tracks on and used well under half the memory. For years Apple have been seen mainly as secondary to Microsoft, and have attracted customers on the back of their "alternative" slightly off-the-wall image (as well as producing excellent machines and software). The boot is on the other foot now that the iPod is seen as the mainstream mp3-type player, particularly when the competition is better than their own product. As Australian TV ads are wont to say: Buy this. It's brilliant.
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