small, lightweight, comfortable to carry, cool design, menu system slick, USB interface

not very robust, downloading music is totally reliable, battery gauge not very accurate, not intuitive to not geek types, download SW a joke, use MusicMatch its more reliable

First impressions were good then things went downhill. My wife actually likes it but it doens't meet my standards. I thought that the user interface was acceptable. Too bad it doesn't have a good clip so that you can attach it to your pants/belt or something. It already got dropped, the power button fell out, and now the case is real flipsy. I hate the fact that you can only use the custom backpack to add memory. I think getting tot he battery is not convenient either. It really needs to support a standard memory card not a custom one. If I could find one of those really small star screwdriver bits I could look inside to see if it uses smart media like one review mentioned. I called the Service line; I was on hold of 40 minutes. The help person seemed nice, courtious, and made a good attempt at being helpful. I was supposed to get an email message on how to ship it back for repair but he message never arrived. I tried talking support into just letting me drive the thing in since the service center is about 15mins from my house. She said that was a bad idea. I'm still using the thing. My recommendation for a MP3 player : 64MB minimum memory, a standard memory format like compact flash, make sure its got good service track record, good reliablity ratings, and not some garage shop company in some hick town. My other MP3 player plays data CDs which is really handy but the firmware still needs some bugs worked out. The MP3 technology is still a bit young at this time.

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NAPA MP3/VCD player, Sony Discman

Great sound, easy-to-use menu and software, nice headphones. Unit is very compact and will fit in even the smallest of pockets.

Customer support sucks, unavailability of promised upgrades.

I had this little jewel up and running in a couple of minutes! Very easy to use and virtually idiot-proof. The around-the-ear headphones are a pleasant change from the in-the-ear and over-the-head types. The LCD back-lit display is easy to read and you can adjust the light stay-on time to meet your needs. Transferring music from your PC to the Rio 600 is a snap. The only problem I have had is with customer support. They advertise on the box that memory upgrades are available on their website, but they're not. They've been saying this for over 2 months. I sent an e-mail and didn't receive a reponse for over a week, and the response was written by some obviously non-english-speaking illiterate person who really didin't understand my question. If I had to rate this product on customer support, it would fail miserably, but the Diamond Rio 600 in itself is an outstanding MP3 player!

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Diamond PMP 300