Date

So I'm going to take the Rocbox back. I should think twice before buying a first generation item from a vendor (even if the price is right).

There were a few things that I liked about it:

  • The feel of the buttons on the front (they click well like an old hp calculator)
  • The side scroll navigation actually works pretty well for one hand navigation (though it takes too many clicks...)
  • The thing feels pretty solid

Now to the bad things:

  • Battery life for me is about 5 hours. This is unacceptable. I recharge the thing every night and listen to it during work (turned off during lunch), and I only get about 5-6 hours out of the thing.
  • No resume! I've got potentially 20 gigs of music, and every time I turn the thing off it forgets where I was (don't want to leave it on with the way it goes through the batteries). This is very annoying.
  • Syncing is more of a hassle and I've heard complaints about playlists not working (I never implemented that in python....)

What to do? I'm actually very intrigued by the iriver h320 ( http://www.iriveramerica.com/prod/hd/h320.aspx ), it appears to have most the features I want (though I'm not sure it will have nice buttons like the rocbox):

  • >= 20 gigs
  • Decent battery life
  • FM radio
  • microphone
  • Drag and drop syncing
  • apple ipod price tag

Well all but the last one are very good. The reviews actually seem pretty good too. Anyone want to trade one for a slightly used rocbox?