Very late to the portable audio party, I finally broke down and bought the Creative Zen Touch 20GB. It just arrived from Amazon tonight and I’ve been checking it out while watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees. So far it seems very solid. With USB 2.0, the songs copy from my PC really fast and the audio quality is surprisingly good.
I couldn’t decide between an iPod or something else, finally choosing the Zen Touch after reading some good reviews. The iPods are really cool and the price didn’t scare me off, but I’m mostly a Windows users and want to keep my options open (i.e., avoid getting locked down to Apple Store formats for purchased music).
I upgraded to Windows Media Player 10 to check out its support for device syncing — much improved over WMP 9. Unfortunately, this device isn’t quite supported yet, but a recent announcement indicates that Creative is planning a firmware upgrade for November to fully enable automatic sync. Cool!
Amazon is currently listing this for $235 which is a pretty good deal. I also bought a pair of Sennheiser in-ear headphones which sound great.