Well, I got it today, I had to go home during lunch and accost my mailman until he admitted he had the thing sitting in his truck for almost a week because he was too lazy to bring it to my door.
Anyway, so I took it to work and checked it out. First impression was positive, light, small and decent enough looking. The headphones that came with it were horrible, not that I expected much, but they are worse than I thought. I tried it out first with the stock garbage earbuds and it had the worst sound I'd ever heard from anything (and one cut my right ear when I went to remove it, the rubber cover came off). Anyway, enough about the earbuds I never planned on using anyway, the only other headphones I have at work are some HD-202s, so after playing with the equilizer (surprisingly it had a custom eq), I plugged in the 202s and it sounded much better, as good as I've heard the 202s sound (not saying much). Problem is that the volume was really low, like it had a problem running the 202s(!). So I put the EQ back to normal and about deafen myself (apparently the custom EQ has a flaw that halves the volume). I'll have to get some better headphones to judge how good the sound is, or maybe I wont since I'll be using EX71s on it (don't wan't to give me a reason to think it sounds bad, if you know what I mean). I think, as long as you don't spend more on the headphones than you did on the player ($50), it's plenty adequate.
The interface isn't bad, a tad minimalistic, but overall not bad. Forget about selecting individual songs, though you can select directories, it takes a lot of fiddling (too much to be usable) to do so. I just load it up and put it on random, so it didn't bother me so much. The interface is probably it's biggest flaw. It has one play/pause button, one little rocker (+/- volume) and one depressable rocker switch (change songs, push for menu/select in menu, navigate menu). It's pretty basic.
Apparently it will play MP3 and WMA, I don't use WMA, but it's played all the MP3s I've thrown at it (128, 192, VBR). It also seemed to read ID3 (v1&2) just fine.
Overall, it seems kind of pricy for $50 +cost of flash drives to just use it as an MP3 player. If it's that you already had the flash drives, and used this as a companion for them, it seems like an ok value. Considering I had the flash drives, I don't wish I had bought something else but, if I didn't, I would have rather bought something a little better in the interface department.
