Awesome quality player and IT WORKS IN LINUX!!!

Hi all. Finally decided to contribute to epinions, and not just read people's thoughts and since I was just using my Sony Walkman figured I would start with it.

First thing, IT WORKS WITH LINUX!!!!! For those on Windows you do NOT know how hard it is to find a player that works that way these days. I thought I'd found a wonderful player in the Sansa e280, but they up and lobotomized their firmware so its pretty much only Microsoft friendly.

Sony Walkmans have been legends in the music players since I was a kid and they released their first Walkman TAPE player. My first personal digital audio player was the 1st Gen. iPod Nano. Wonderful player, but 1Gb was just too small for me and it didn't do video.

After looking at players for a while I got the Sony player aroud the first week of December. Its feels like its built pretty solid. Sound quality is wonderful. It has a built-in FM receiver (wake up Steve Jobs!!! Why is the iPod the last music player not to have one?!?!?!?). Small criticism about the onboard FM. They don't use an internal antenna, rather relying on your earphone cord to act as an antenna. To get the best reception you have to make sure you drape it to its fullest length. And there must be something special about it too as I tried it with my new Etymotic ER-6p earbuds and the sound/reception clearly is not there when compared to the Sony ones. This means I've got to have two earbuds with me when I go on vacation. Minor annoyance, but one nonetheless.

Video is very nice and can rotate at a flick of a button. It says its supports H.264, but I can't seem to be able to load any video of my own onto it to watch. (Since I'm using drag & drop maybe I'm missing something. Unfortunately, I can't use the included CD as its only for Windows).

Audio. Supports lots of formats, BUT, doesn't support DRM'd AAC (Apples iTunes), which doesn't surprise me, nor does it support OGG, which is a bummer as that's an open source format that wouldn't cost them anything to include other than the rather minor sweat equity time the developers do.

Battery life? Simply amazing. Can't remember the stats, but this thing uses power more miserly than the ever clicheish camel drinking water in the desert. When I bought the Etymotic earbuds mentioned above I read somewhere that you should put them through a "burn in" period where you pump sound through them, place them on the desk and just walk away. I decided to do that and then after a day decided to see how long it would go. After a day and a half it still had a third of a battery indicator left, and this was while using the FM receiver, if that makes any difference. Definately looking forward to using it on a 18 hour plane ride to Jordan next month.

There are a few other annoyances that can hopefully be ironed out whenever they get around to releasing some firmware updates.

No bookmarks. It remembers the location in the very last song/podcast you played, however, if you go to another song, you have to start at the beginning if you go back to another one.

There is no progressive Fast Forward/Rewind. Meaning the longer you hold the FF or Rew. button, the quicker you move through the item. This is something Rockbox has and I "think" the iPod had as well. Now if you're advancing through a 3 min. song you can do without that, but if you're trying to advance through a 120 min. podcast to the 99 min. it can really be a bummer.

Once your music starts playing the screen will go blank after a few seconds. That's all fine, but they've got this thing set so that the clock pops up briefly every 20 seconds or so. And there doesn't seem to be a way to either change that time period or (preferably) turn it off completely.

When synching with Amarok (the #1 player in Linux) there doesn't seem to be a way of getting the album art to work. Probably doesn't effect too many people reading this review, but its still a problem. I've looked at the Amarok boards and nobody else seems to be able to lick this problem. The one time I hooked this player up to my Vista machine (at work), not only did it sync, but it also loaded the album art just fine. It created an .alb file, which I have no idea on how to do. Perhaps in Amarok 2.0 they'll have that fixed?

Overall I'm please with this player and happy I chose it. Now if more people would come up with third party accessories that would be awesome. I had to shell out $25 for a silicone protective case!! That's just way too much money for something that people cost 2 cents to manufacture in some back alley in the Far East. And I can't seem to find any cheap chargers for it either.