On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 09:23:26AM -0500, Keller, Tim wrote: Tim.Keller> 7. It has a 40 second cache so the battery life is pretty long. The Sonicblue Rio Volt SP250 has an 8 minute cache, and about 15 hours of battery life. Tim.Keller> 3. Can't recharge batteries in the device. My old discman does this, why Tim.Keller> couldn't these guys? Not sure if they improved this in the SP250. If not, I would keep two sets of batteries, one for the device, and one to charge. Go for NiMH's or Li-Ion's instead of NiCad's, too, since they don't have a memory effect and have a longer life than NiCad's. The Rat-Shack has a nice set of 4 NiMH AA's + 4-battery AA charger that will do NiCad OR NiMH for about $20. Tim.Keller> 4. Those stupid dancing people and that spinning CD icon (which looks a lot Tim.Keller> like the fan icon on the front of a Sun E1000 fibre array). I would have Tim.Keller> ditched the people and made the text display larger so you could put more Tim.Keller> info on it. (in the same vein I would have dumped the stupid fan icon and Tim.Keller> put "FAN BROKE" but that's just me...:) The display is larger on the SP250, and I believe they got rid of the stupid dancing people. They did get rid of the LCD on the remote, though, which could be a drawback. I don't know how useful the remote-LCD was given the challenge of navigating on the larger LCD on the main unit itself... I tried to find a place to buy the iriver (basically the same as the SP250 but with LCD on remote), but the English pages were broken. They do apparently make a U.S. version, though, so you can plug it in without a converter and the FM radio part actually receives the U.S. FM frequency band. -- Charles R. Anderson <cra@wpi.edu> / http://angus.ind.wpi.edu/~cra/ PGP Key ID: 49BB5886 Fingerprint: EBA3 A106 7C93 FA07 8E15 3AC2 C367 A0F9 49BB 5886