You can’t really go wrong with the iPod – brilliant design, small size, huge storage capacity, and now, PC compatiblity.
Nomad Creative Zen
The iPod is great, but a good lower priced alternative is Creative’s Nomad Zen. The design isn’t as hot, but the price is great ($282.49 after rebate) and you don’t have sacrifice storage space – the Nomad Zen has 20 gigabytes of capacity.
Having 20 gigs to play with is great, but there are probably plenty of people on your holiday shopping list who are nowhere close to owning enough CDs to fill up even a 5GB iPod. Here are a couple of good alternatives:
Rio’s S35s lightweight digital audio player is aimed at sports and exercise enthusiasts, and comes with 128MB of memory (upgradeable to 256MB), as well as a built-in FM radio, clock, and stopwatch.
iRiver SlimX iMP-350
With most new computers these days coming with CD burners, and a CD-R capable of holding about ten hours of MP3s, it’s no wonder that most new portable CD players can handle both regular CDs and CD-Rs of MP3s. The SlimX iMP-350 from iRiver is one of the best of the bunch, and is just 16.7mm thick.
