MP3 Madness

Amy and I are thinking about picking up a new mp3 player. Amybear has a 512 megs of memory in her satellite radio. It's not enough and the radios interface stinks. She's going to upgrade to my 1G Mobiblu cube. It's a nice unit. 1 gig is enough music that you can't play it all on a single battery charge. Unfortunately it isn't enough to haul around your entire music collection and listen to whatever you want. You need to plan ahead. You also put files on there with Windows Explorer, which kind of sucks as an interface. If I were smart or bored, I'd write a decent Tcl GUI to do my file management for me.

But that aside, we're both thinking about getting a new mp3 player in the multi-zulti-gig portable music archive category. The two leading contenders are the iPod Classic and the Zune 80. Most of the comparisons indicate that the Zune is the iPod's equal. So we're leaning towards the Zune because we don't use Mac (the Zune's kryptonite), we don't particularly like Apple, but we do like the FM radio feature and the bigger screen on the Zune. Unlike most third party players, the Zune also seems to have a some third party vendor support which was the Mobiblu's Achilles heel.

UPDATE: Amy and I hit several places to look at mp3 players on display. We played with Zunes, Sansas, iPods, etc. The Sandisk products felt kind of cheap and the Archos products were either huge or unavailable. After getting a chance to play, we still like the Zune but its PC software makes us nervous. We're not in a hurry to buy, so maybe we'll wait and see if the market changes.