I’ve written this email to enough people now that I really should just post it for every one else: I say if you want an mp3 player to go head to head with the ipod the Creative Zen Micro is great.
One of the decisions that should go in to buying any mp3 player is how much music you’re actually going to want to put on it. With most mp3 coming in around 3mb and a cd coming in between 40 - 70 mbs you should be able to figure how much music you want to have with you at all times. the more music you are willing to swap on and off the device the smaller hard drive you can get.
The Creative Zen Micro has 5gb of space which is roughly 1666 songs or about 83 hours of music.
Cnet has a great list of best of the best mp3 players and also navigation to change what type of mp3 players you are looking at. The most important categories are: Flash memory MP3 players | Hard drive MP3 players | Micro hard drive MP3 players
Flash memory is the hardest to break since it has no moving parts but has the smallest space. typical about 1gb.
hard drive and micro hard drive are easier to break (both the ipod and Creative Zen Micro micro hard drives) but have much larger storage. micro hard drives are smaller and have less storage then regular hard drives but stay about the same price as regular hard drives. regular hard drives have more space but can become annoying to carry around since they are so big.