SanDisk Sansa m240 (1GB, silver)

Pros: price, subscription support, lightgweight

Cons: won't play some files, could be a little louder

Summary: A great value for the price. Only the second flash based player to work with subscription services and much cheaper than the iRiver T series. A little flimsy to the touch, but it is more solid than it might appear. But ... it failed to play five files I loaded onto it properly. On four of the files, the music simply jumped to the next track in the middle of the song, always at the same point. On the 5th track, the music went into an endless 3 second loop which played out for the remainder of the track's time. Very strange.

The five tracks have little in common: one was a Yahoo to Go WMA Janus track, two were mp3s (one VBR one CBR), and the other two were 160K WMAs version 9. The remaining tracks I loaded played fine and sounded good with a custom EQ (it sounds horrible at the default setting). The FM radio was sensitive and it was nice to have 20 presets.

A nice player but seriously at the moment by some flawed firmware.