Hi. I'm going to buy a portable player in the very near future. My price tag is 200€, and my choices right now are:

- Commodore eVIC 20GB - 199€
- Apple iPod Mini 4GB (M9800/A) - 199€ <-- this is the model with prolongued battery life, right?
- Creative Zen Micro 5GB - 199€

I live in Spain, and unless I import my freedom of choice is quite limited. Money is also a problem; I was initially going to buy and iPod Shuffle, but for +3GB I'll make the effort and get the Mini. Then I saw the eVIC and Zen Micro were on price, too.

Can anyone comment on the Commodore? I couldn't find much info about it. It seems to be quite resistant and software is known to be buggy (solved with recent firmwares, which are nowhere to be found in Commodore's site as far as I can see). I'm mostly interested in audio quality, battery life and ease of use. It includes a docking station, a carrying case and can be used as an external HDD drive. It supports Vorbis, too, so if battery life is good this can be decisive.

Until I know more about the eVIC the iPod is my main option right now. I don't like the idea of using iTunes to feed it with music, and the alternatives seem a bit hackish right now. I might use AAC, although I would have to make some tests to see if there's a real benefit (for me) over MP3 at ~160Kbit/s with my music. Encoding with Quicktime/Nero seems to be a pain, too (tagging compatibility hell), and some of my albums would have to be transcoded from MPC or WavPack lossy using foobar2000. Except for the Apple way of doing things, it seems a rather good player.

I don't know much about the Zen, but it is in my price range. I dislike being limited to MP3 only (WMA is not an option), but I get 1 gig more than the iPod for the price. I might consider it if it excells over the other two, or if I finally don't use AAC.

I'd like to hear your comments. Thanks in advance.

I got the Zen 2 months ago and I like it, it plays all kinds of mp3's with no problem, the sound is decent it has nice playlist display and creation it has FM radio and a quite nice menu IMO.

It comes with 2 batteries 1 to use and 1 spare the life of the battery can exceed 7+ hours of intense play and menu navigation it is also very light and very small.

Also the software is simple and effective and it you like WMP10 for some reason it supports it 100%.

Thanks, I might get one after all. It seems the sound quality of the iPod Mini is not as good as I first thought it'd be (source: head-fi forums). Is the Zen solid and well-built? You mention a software: is it mandatory or one can use explorer to add songs?

Regards.

I would be interested in the commodore just for its retro-value, but honestly, even the website gives a buggy impression (seems like it was coded for IE-only).

- Lyx

Those are my thoughts, too. Feature-wise it seems good, it's the lack of trustful opinions what makes me doubt. No reviews, no (valuable) user feedback that I can find. Sigh.

Regards.

It is both well build and solid, no you do not need a software if you have WinXP SP2 and WMP10, unless you like to handle playlists inside the Zen.