My Rio Karma was looking a bit worse for wear and its battery was a shadow of its former self, so I was already considering replacing it... but the other day it was stolen, so I'm most definitely in the market for a new player.
so what i'm looking for is something like:-
i'm not averse to installing rockbox or something if that's what it takes.
I recently bought a Cowon D2 and it's an awesome piece of work. It's a flash memory based player because I wanted the benefits of that. But they also sell hard drive based players, maybe you can find one that meets your requirements on their homepage.
Could a cheap PDA achieve this task? I'm not sure how many can take hard drives -- perhaps that's something the market should consider.
I'd certainly entertain the idea of a PDA that can act as USB storage and music player with decent capacity. (Perhaps with the OS stored in flash and some songs, and the ability to fire it up without the HDD enabled to save batteries.)
>>8-9
If you're going for a flash-based player, you may as well get the Karma's spiritual successor:
http://www.trekstor.de/en/products/detail_mp3.php?pid=66
>>11
that player actually lacks most of the Karma's playlist editing functions for no apparent reason. just like the iPod, in fact. funny that.
>>9
Well it plays all the formats mentioned. Additionally it plays mpeg4 movies in avi containers at 30fps but those have to be converted to 320x240 pixels or less (the display's resolution) first. It also has experimental support for Macromedia Flash files but those don't work too well for me so far. Maybe with the next firmware. As a gimmick you can view images and text files as well. All versions have FM radio and it seems that there are also newer versions with DAB instead of FM radio.
It can use playlists but I haven't toyed much with those yet. My guess is that it can handle standard m3u and/or pls playlists but no guarantees. There's also a dynamic playlist that you can edit rapidly.
It is claimed that the battery lasts for ~50 hours of music play time. Couldn't confirm that so far because I haven't had to recharge it yet since I bought it and I have listened about 2-3 hours each day for the past two weeks. Of course the battery won't last as long for a hard drive based player.
According to the reviews I've read the audio quality is supposed to be superb and my subjective impression is the same. Sometimes I listen with it rather than with my stereo because I like it so much.
It has a touch screen and only 3 normal buttons at the top, so if you want to control it via buttons rather than the touch screen, maybe it isn't for you.
So yes, all in all I think it would meet the requirements of OP, provided the touch screen and lack of remote control aren't knock-out criteria. But my point was that maybe the company also sells hard disc players with similar capabilities/quality. That might be a good alternative to iPod. Research is needed.