iRiver Clix (2 GB) Digital Media Player

When somebody has almost 80% market share, it's tempting to wonder why anyone else bothers to try to compete. of course, I could be talking about Apple's iPod and iTunes combo in the market for digital music, or I could be talking about the Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer combination in the market for desktop OS/browser. So it was only a matter of time before Microsoft's braintrust, in this case working in close conjunction with iRiver's Korean product engineers, came close to duplicating the seemlessness of the iPod hardware plus iTunes software plus iTunes Music Store website user experience. When used with WMP 11 beta, which comes with the player on a CD, you get a quickly and easily navigable, tag-oriented database (supporting playlists, album & contributing artists, song & album titles, and genre names) of Music including album art support and on-the-fly queueing and playlisting, the ability to view jpg pix and avi videos (320x240 @ 15 frames per sec.), and to play the surprisingly decent FM Radio (w/auto presets) and FlashLite (v1.1 or v2.0) games. Throw in the direct audio recording and manual text/folder browsing, along with a programmable alarm clock/timer & EQ/sound enhancement settings, and you have both feature parity/superiority to the iPod and an excellent out-of-box experience compared to most other MP3/OGG/WMA/Protected WMA-JanusDRM devices. Excellent!