Not everyone's in love with the Apple and the iPod, and that's what Archos, Microsoft with their Zune and Creative count on. Archos' 5th generation portable music and video player, the 605 WiFi improved on the Archos 604 and give the iPod Touch a run for...

Fantastic display in terms of resolution, size and overall quality-- eat your heart out iPod Touch! Good sound quality, varied video and audio format support. Small, light and attractive. Web browser is quite good, though a tad slow. YouTube support is ex...

Battery life is passable but not being able to swap in a spare battery on the road is a kill-joy. Many features require additional purchases. Not very intuitive-- should we have to work hard just to have fun?

A compact PVP with the best screen on the market. It's truly a pleasure to watch and at 4.3" your eyes won't cross half way through a transatlantic flight. The Archos 605 WiFi packs a lot of features into a very petit package, though we do wish that using...

The video-centric portable media player market isn't exactly a crowded place these days. At least not in the US, where the iPod and iPhone dominate. Players like the Creative Zen Vision W seem old and bulky, Cowan isn't exactly a household name and Micros...

Very easy to use, great sound, plays video as well as audio. Acts as a portable photo album and portable hard drive. Great color display that's saturated, bright and vivid. Huge capacity for music and video in a very, very thin and small device.

You can burn music from your CDs and put them on your iPod, no problem. But if you want to buy copy protected music it must come from the Apple iTunes store. Shows fingerprints like crazy and scratches easily. Battery life for video playback could be bett...

As a video player and web surfing tablet, the Archos 5 is the cream of the crop. The screen is absolutely fantastic, and large enough to really enjoy a movie and read web pages without constant zooming. Yet the player is small (albeit heavy) and slim. The...

Very easy to use, great sound, plays video as well as audio. Acts as a portable photo album and portable hard drive. Great color display that's saturated, bright and vivid. Huge capacity for music and video in a very, very thin and small device.

You can burn music from your CDs and put them on your iPod, no problem. But if you want to buy copy protected music it must come from the Apple iTunes store. Shows fingerprints like crazy and scratches easily. Battery life for video playback could be bett...

As a video player and web surfing tablet, the Archos 5 is the cream of the crop. The screen is absolutely fantastic, and large enough to really enjoy a movie and read web pages without constant zooming. Yet the player is small (albeit heavy) and slim. The...

Music videos make music more fun to listen to and can even give you a new appreciation for a song-unless you happen to own a first- or second- generation iPod nano, in which case you'll have to appreciate an error message telling you that videos cannot be...

Supports video playback, can output to TV, supports Cover Flow; very compact and sleek design, bright screen, enhanced user interface and games.

Battery life and storage capacity are good, but could be better, audio and video sections are still separate.

The 8 GB version of the nano is available in black, silver, blue, green, and Product Red editions; a 4 GB version is also available, in silver only, for a suggested retail price of $149. Eight gigabytes is enough to hold about 8 hours of video, 2,000 audi...

Portable media players are second class citizens compared to MP3 and small format video-capable music players like the iPod Video and Zune when it comes to sales figures. Why? The little guys are about half the size, which suits those who want something t...

Fantastic widescreen display is perfect for movie playback: high resolution, great brightness and super-saturated color with a good viewing angle and sharpness. Sound quality is also excellent and the FM radio gets better reception than average, though th...

No add-on hardware for recording video. Natively supports JPEG format photos only- RAW photographers can backup images from a card to the Zen Vision W but they can't view them. Requires included drivers to mount the entire drive as a removable disk (only...

If you're a video collector, DVD ripper (we won't tell anyone), YouTube addict or are enamored with Amazon's Unbox service and want to take your videos with you anywhere, the Creative Zen Vision W is an excellent choice. We recommend the 60 gig if you can...

Compete with the iPod? You've got to be crazy. That is unless you're Microsoft, with huge OS marketplace dominance, brand awareness, development resources and money to jump into that game. Let's face it, iPod rules (in a rare turn of the tables where Appl...

Very good sound, extremely easy to use. Large and lovely 3" display. Textured outer layer protects the device from scratches and fingerprints, and adds a bit of drop protection. Zune Marketplace and the Zune desktop software are also very easy to use, loo...

The Zune Marketplace has 2 million tunes vs. iTunes' 3.5 million. The player is larger and heavier than the iPod 5G. The large and luscious screen and no video store in the Marketplace makes me weep. No audio books yet in the Marketplace. WiFi just begs f...

We didn't expect to be at all impressed by Microsoft's first effort at an iPod competitor. Boy, were we pleasantly surprised! The device is well made (OK, that we expected), is packaged very austerely and attractively (shocker) and is superbly easy to use...

Just when you thought that Sony was out of the handheld business in the US, they surprise you with the mylo in August 2006. Mylo, stands for my life online, and though it isn't as smart as the once very popular Sony Clie PDAs it's targeting at a smaller s...

Simply cool looking and feels great in hand. WiFi made easy with automatic search and connect. The keyboard makes it easy to IM and email. Great for playing music, viewing photos and videos thanks to the high quality screen and the expansion slot. Very go...

Expensive for what you get and for the intended (youth) market. Limited built-in IM clients. No backlight on keyboard. No video converter software supplied. Only supports web-based email, no email client included.

We really like the Pepper Pad: it's intuitive, has a high resolution screen that's easy on the eyes, is rugged and offers instant on access to the Web and more. The Pad requires no maintenance and that means no service packs, anti-virus updates or spyware...

Just in case you're a newbie, the iPod is a portable music player that's quite small and very attractive. It can play MP3 as well as AAC music along with Apple's own format used on the tunes in their iTunes store. You can burn your CDs using iTunes (or ev...

Very easy to use, great sound, plays video as well as audio. Acts as a portable photo album and portable hard drive. Great color display that's saturated, bright and vivid. Huge capacity for music and video in a very, very thin and small device.

You can burn music from your CDs and put them on your iPod, no problem. But if you want to buy copy protected music it must come from the Apple iTunes store. Shows fingerprints like crazy and scratches easily. Battery life for video playback could be bett...

It's an iPod- what's not to like? It's gorgeous, can hold an obscene amount of music, show photos, easily fit in your pocket and there are a huge number of tempting accessories available for it. It's the easiest to use among media players with an intuitiv...

Portable multimedia players are really just beginning to take off and a lot of interesting companies are getting into the PMP arena. Some have been making MP3 players and other devices for some time, and others are getting into PMP's for the first time. P...

-Excellent support of Video / Audio formats -Great battery life -40GB or 80GB hard drive for storage of files -SPDIF output -Wireless remote

-No S Video output -No internal radio antenna