Yes! Definitely!

My only beef is with the piss poor earphones they come with. And the bass is a little bit weak because there's no proper equaliser, just a bunch of presets. Oh, and the price. And the battery life.

I'm not selling this very well am I?

But seriously, they're great - any cons are outweighed by the superb interface, ease of transfer of mp3s, the looks and the software.

They're easy to use for technophobes, but other than that the technology of most of them is a few years out of date. You're really only paying to be part of a club of supercool people with white earphones.

For the same price of an ipod (and i believe them come with a charger, earphones and thats it), i got an H340 from Iriver which is 40gig, has a 32,000 color display for viewing photos, can transfer files from other mp3 players and cameras with nothing but a cable (provided), allows you to watch videos, has a built in radio which you can record direct to mp3, has an internal microphone (and they give you an external one too), allows you to view text files, gives you 16hours of playback on a 2 hour charge (MUCH better than ipod). It also comes with a charging base, extra battery pack to double the play time, a remote control, headphones, leather carry case, it does not need an intermediate program like itunes, can store normal files as it works as a hard drive. The only problem is that you need to be technically savvy to get the video working as you need to convert videos into a specific format. Other than that, Iriver is the one to go for. They upgrade their firmware at regular intervals (for instance at first the player did not play video at all, they only added that feature a few weeks ago) and also replace players at the drop of a hat, even if its your fault that its damaged.

Jamie

go for it! i bought mine at the same time as a powerbook in some deal where i got the 40gb iPod for £70 when i should have got it for £200. win. steer clear of all the supposed 'ipod killers' - sure the price is right but mostly they all look terrible (hey, im a graphic designer, im not carrying around something that looks like buck rogers' pager) and iPod has a huge collection of add-ons that are growing every day including stuff like FM transmitters, dictaphones, nice speaker systems.. with time they can only get more adventurous.

but yeah, ditch the earphones. they look twattish and you may as well wear a sandwich board saying 'I HAVE £200 OF ELECTRONICS IN MY POCKET, MUG ME NOW'.

I love my iPod. I listen to it mainly on the tube so the supposedly 'poor' sound quality doesn't bother me at all.

The new Sony 20gb thing looks pretty good too but isn't it about £300?

I really like the itunes software, so easy to use. It's much better than the sonicstage stuff I used to use for my MD player.

Have recently done a fair bit of research on the subject having decided to take the plunge and get ine.

Didn't take me long to decide the iPod itself wasn't the way to go - hyper expensive, problematic batteries, easily scratched and those (apparently mega-poxy sounding) silly "mug-me" headphones.

The Creative Zen players are way, way better value and just about all the feedback I unearthed on them was very positive.

I guess, like everything else electronic these days, there's something better and cheaper round the corner. It's just a case of when you decide to invest in tomorrow's obsolesence but I really would give the Apple players a miss.

on a slightly seperate note, my itunes no longer lets me burn cds: it stops after the first couple of tracks and says unknown error 4450 occurred. anyone know what this means and/or how to fix it or get around it??