Brought this back in jan 2005 from ebay. Simply amazed by its standard firmware functionality. Couldnt quite believe that it could record from an optical in source in different formats at first until I tried it.

Remote is a saviour, suprised its ommited from so many new MP3 players?! Keep it well out of site this way.

Sound quality is excellent via my Sennheiser PX100 headphones, and the Sennheiser earphones that come with it arent bad either!

This device really comes into its own using the rockbox firmware, adds features like on-the-go playlisting, fully working M3U playback, reduces startup time to just 6s, gives you battery estimate in time, change the interface on the big and little LCDs and much more.

Battery life with the original battery is good, realistically 17hrs with MP3s and 12hrs with Ogg vorbis. New battery with larger capacity (1650mah) takes this to 25hrs MP3 playback. Unfortunately the german company who provided the battery no longer is around although there should be another location to find them.

It can be treated like its a removable HDD, which is ideal for transferring music onto, as it'll work in *any* platform that can connect to a USB mass storage device , which is virtually any modern operating system. Works at USB2 speeds no problems on my nvidia nforce2/nforce3/ati xpress 200/SiS 755 based systems.

All in all , apart from its bulkyness (due to the strong magnesium chassis) its a great mp3 player.