Where did I leave my MP3 Player?

It seems that these days, in one form or another, most of us have portable MP3 players.  Whether they are 1 or 2 gig players or larger 120 gig players, audio only or video and touch screen, MP3 players are everywhere today, especially with the younger crowd. 

For a long time, I’ve been watching the MP3 player market waiting for the right option to come along and grab my attention. Not only did I want the ability to play MP3s, I was also looking for one that could play some movies as well on a reasonably large screen.  And if I could find an FM radio built in, all the better.  And on top of it all, I wanted it to cost as little as possible.

There are a few options out there that I think fit the bill, but the one that I recently ended up with was an 8 gig model from Creative, called the Zen.  Right off the bat I decided that I am not a huge audiophile, I just wanted reasonable music capabilities, so I decided to save a few bucks and not go with the X-Fi series of Zen.  While it would have been nice, it was more than I needed.  But I got everything that I wanted.  There’s 8 gigs of solid state memory allowing me do throw on tons of music as well as a handful of movies, and there also an SDHC memory card slot for memory expansion.  The Zen has a 2.5" LCD screen with a resolution of 320×240, which is pretty good for an MP3 player of that size.  In my opinion, this is the smallest size screen that I would go with if you want to be able to see the videos that are playing.  Anything smaller and you’re just listening to the audio.  The FM radio is not the strongest, especially due to the lack of an external antenna, but it does pick up a decent signal and I am unaware of any MP3 players that do the job better.  These are not the only capabilities of the player, but this is not a review.  Just the start of a discussion on MP3 players.

So for all of you out there, what do you use and what features do you like/dislike about it?  Leave some feedback.  We’d like to know.