The Plug n Play nature to iRiver, makes it the winner for me. Rather tahn having to load up software onto every PC you use, be it home, work, your mates machine the one time. Plus youre not restricted to what Filetypes you can play, like the iPod. Ask your friends, for a lend of their different players for a day or 2. See which one you like best.

what friends?

Im an iRiver person as well. Ive got the ihp140, one of their older models. The newer models have colour screens. While they may not look as well as the iPlod, they definitely make up for it in functionality. check out www.mp3players.co.uk, for the player your interested in. They are pretty cheap, but the handy thing about this site for me was the user reviews that can be found for each product

Ask a hobo

did. he had a creative zen. shows what he knows.

It depends what you want from your MP3 player, how much you want to store on it in one go, where it'll be used and what your budget is. When people say "mp3 player" most people automatically think of an iPod style hard drive based device, but these devices, brilliant as they are, are relatively delicate and expensive. If you want something cheaper and don't need to store more than a few songs at a time, solid state players are a good alternative and are cheap enough that you won't be as worried about losing or damaging them and theres no hard disk to worry about damaging when you drop it. A lot of these also allow you to store files on a removeable SD memory card, which is cool because SD cards are anywhere from 32mb to 1Gigabyte (maybe more these days) so you get a decent amount of space for very little cash and can simply buy more cards and swap them round if you wish. If your player breaks, you can also stick simply the card in another player, PC or compatible device. Not going to bother reccomending a brand because these things tend to be made in Taiwan by generic electronics companies. This will give you an idea of what I mean though: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=48223&&source=14&doy=search