Ten of the Best... iPod rivals
Flash colours? No thanks
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Round-up Yes, the news is dominated by this week's revamped iPods, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other good media players out there. Put off the colourful Nano, or the shiny Touch? Then here are ten of the best alternatives. Counting down, in reverse order, we kick of with the...
Creative Zen X-Fi
Click here for the full review

The X-Fi's a bit of a disappointment. The lack of storage integration, the odd controls and the truly hopeless text input system all combine to take shine off a decent looking and sounding little player. It's hard to avoid the feeling that Creative have missed an open goal here by making the X-Fi so small. If it was broader and taller and came with a decent resolution 4 or 4.5in screen, we'd crawl over our dead grandmother to get one, superfluous applications notwithstanding.
Reg Rating 60%
Price £150/$200 (16GB) £240/$280 (32GB)
iRiver E100
Click here for the full review

Not a bad box of tricks performance wise, and blessed with both better-than-average file support and Micro SD storage expansion. But you really have to not mind your media being presented to you in two separate chunks. It's bad enough if you're using a 2 or 4 GB memory card, but imagine using a 16GB one? You'd have two-thirds of the player's musical content only accessible through a basic Directory menu. No thanks.
Reg Rating 65%
Price £60 (2GB) £80/$110 (4GB) £100/$160 (8GB)
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Meizu Mini Player SL
COMMENTS
MediaMonkey
Why does everyone who thinks that people who dislikes iPods/iTunes uses Explorer to manage our music? There are plenty of alternatives including the excellent MediaMonkey for Windows.
Why bother?
iPod mini with knackered hard drive £10 plus a 32Gb compact flash £35 and for £45 you've got a robust, compact, high capacity MP3 player (install Linux and you can play other formats, ogg etc.), you could even pretend that you prefer the "retro look", but imagine the cheap accessories that having an iPod can bring.
I also use my W810 with an 8Gb card (microsd+converter) which was dirt cheap.
If you want video, the old Creative Zen 30gb is wonderful, and I'm sure that most users would agree that it's better than the same spec iPod (chunkier, harder screen, better battery life, more video codecs)
@Anonymous Coward - Alternative to an iPod
Not sure what you mean by Winamp "used to be a good system". Are you referring to the failed version 3? They scrapped that years ago.
Current versions work just like the old Winamp 2 if you choose the 'classic skin' and close the media library.

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