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Cowon (english site makes music players and mini-tablets that are made in South Korea. They are also some of the best on the market, but tend to be harder to find/buy due to their lack of marketing and they are a Korean company, with very little to no North American market visibility.

Lets see, check check..check and check, but no matter...

While you can easily get away with installing software which is patented (at least in the stupid United Corporations of America), corporations, since they have a lot of money, are the targets of lawsuits by patent holders/sharks/trolls/etc, so they can't include them and it is simply dangerous. So, when and where you are able to, convert your things to truly open formats. While I could also argue using patented things may actually help companies try to fight software patents, not using them of course removes the power these patents have as well. While I'd prefer the law was changed, sadly the latter might be the better choice because the more money which is at stake, the more lobbyists there will be, so it will be less probable that the laws will actually be overhauled intelligently.

Any way, I converted all my media away from patented formats long ago. There are several, for example, MP3 to OGG converting programs available, and while lossy to lossy conversions are normally bad, it works surprisingly well. Not to mention, OGG Vorbis is just fucking kick ass, and MP3 should have been vanquished long ago. I don't care if your ipod can't play OGG, maybe you should be buying something like a Cowon instead then.

More or less. The cult + those who are woefully uninformed about competing products. Half the people who are buying "ipods" dont even know there are alternatives. Much like most religions there are those who are the true believers and those who simply do not know anything else.

So what are all of these "better" alternatives -- especially to the Touch or the Nano? Every company but Apple has basically abandoned the high capacity market (except for Archos). So what's the alternative to the Classic?

I used to own an iPod (2 in fact, both broke within a year...) and after that I bought a COWON S9. Beats the crap out of the iPod in every way. Doesn't crash once a day like both iPods did (got to learn real well the restart command of an iPod), the sound is so much better (same files and headphones from the iPod), battery life rocks (55 hours'ish, no joke. I had to recharge the iPod daily, once ever few days for the S9), doesn't randomly freeze when I'm playing new songs, no 'special' software needed, the computer reads it like a USB drive and I just drag and drop. Beats the iPod in every way. As for the Nano, the SanDisk Clip+ is better.

However the ipod is just shit. Its highly proprietary and DRMed out the ass. I pods are more expensive their their equal quality competitors. iTunes is just a bastard of a bit of software. It causes massive stabability issues and is a complete and utter resource hog. Ipods are known to be fragile and scratch prone.

iTunes hasn't sold DRM'd music (or music videos) in over a year and where can you get DRM free video from any store -- either physical or electronic. The iPod plays bog standard MP3, WAV, AAC audio and H.264 and MPeg video. So where are all these cheaper better alternatives to the Touch, Nano, and Classic?

The DRM is in the hardware. Try to take any song/video on an iPod and put it back on the computer. You can't due to the iPod's DRM. As for the alternatives, look at the players on http://www.anythingbutipod.com/ which is for mp3 players, and you'll find many that are better.

Do you have a source for your claims of fragility and a comparison of the reliability of the iPod compared to other music players?

I've given you the links and shown you better ones. Just because you only know iPods, doesn't mean they are the only ones out there.

Matroska in general is great and a lot better than Ogg or others, but it doesn't work on any device besides PC

That's not entirely true.

Cowon supports it. They make MP3 players and PMPs if you've never heard of them. jetaudio.com/products

Take a look at the iAudio M5 or M3. I have an older iAudio and just got us some newer flash-based ones at work (for digital voice and line-in recording). They sound excellent and support a lot of formats. They're not as easy to navigate as an iPod, but they do a lot more. Unfortunately, the M5 doesn't do FM, which the other ones do. I'm looking to pair one of the FM-capable ones up with a nice pair of multimedia speakers (like the Swans I have at my home desk) and do away with my old CD/cassette/FM radio box at work. Then I can listen on the way in to work through headphones, plug in, listen at work, pull the plug and home I go. Kind of like a laptop for audio. Here's the official links: http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/m5/ and http://www.jetaudio.com/products/iaudio/m3/. You might want to check out the iAudiophile fan site: http://www.iaudiophile.net/. Have fun and watch out for tinnitus.

First of all, a 20GB iPod isn't exactly *small*.

Small might be considered something like the iPod Nano. There is a good reason why folks bought more iPod minis than "regular" iPods, especially those of us who (gasp!) work out.

Secondly, you did notice that for all the cool "video" and "photo" features, this iPod-killer has a screen with 160x128 resolution, while the iPods have 220x176, so corners got cut somewhere along the way to making this all-in-wonder.

What other corners do you think they cut to improve the spec sheet? :-)

Check out the iAudio X5. Plays all sorts of formats, and is Linux friendly. No software, just drag and drop you stuff onto it and it plays.

abandoned? m3 firmware 1.36 was released on may 27 2005.
http://www.cowonamerica.com/download/iaudio_rn_m3. html ...only one bug fix though... so maybe they have basically dropped development on the m3.

one thing about cowon/iaudio that is kind of annoying is that they seem to have about 5 different websites, but not all of them are always up to date. e.g., there are better user forums here: http://www.jetaudio.com/forums/index.php

that and the bad korean->english translations.

I've got my eye on this one:

http://www.jetaudio.com/products/iaudio/m3/info_sp ecifications.html

...because, apparently, everyone's trying to kill it. ;)

Seriously, why does every new HD-based MP3 player need to be called an "iPod killer"? Is it impossible to have a successful product if it doesn't put the iPod to shame?

Look, there's no doubt the iPod is a great product. Apple's mixed enough marketing hype (and let's face it, a lot of the iPod's success has to be attributed to hype) with a great navigation tool and the best (bit still a far cry from ideal) online music store around. It's a genuinely high-quality product. ...but then again, so is Creative's Zen line. So are half a dozen other manufacturers' competetive products. Hell, my JetAudio iAudio M3 gets a bunch of oohs and aahs every time someone sees me using it, including iPod owners.

It's easy to beat the iPod on hardware; it's been done time and time again. iTMS, well, that's a mixed bag. Some people love it, and others couldn't possibly care less about it. Where the iPod is untouchable is mindshare; until you see Creative airing commercials for the Nomad during the Superbowl, no one will. Because, let's face it: just like Joe Sixpack thinks AOL is the internet, he thinks the iPod is the only digital audio player in town.

Yeah, and look at the accessoires you get with that player!

As long as they don't ship you accidentily the "Huge-Black-Male" expansion, all will be fine :)

It is actully smaller than iPod, comes in 20GB and 40GB versions, and comes with std battery life of 14 hrs and an extended one comes with battery life of 35 HOURs.

It shows up as a USB mass storage on your PC, so can be used in windows, linux , OSX natively (any OS that supports USB mass storage). Doesn't need a stupid s/w to organize your MP3 collection, works by scanning the harddisk.

And it plays MP3, WMAs, Flac, and most of all Oggs.

Much more sturdier than iPod. Has FM tuner and can record from FM or buil-in or in-line Microphone.

The only thing it doesn't have is a interface with an online music store, But that's not a problem for someone like me , who already has more that 400 CDs.

P.S. I am not a spokesman for the company, just a satisfied customer.

Agree.

And this korean based mp3 player is really good too.

I'm sure you know this already, but in case you don't, there are two players that will play Real files fine, Jet Audio and Real Alternative. I don't know if they're legal or not, but they've both been around for a long time. Jet Audio is a pretty good media player.
Jet Audio
Real Alternative

Your point is still valid of course. I'm not sure how these two play Real files but I'm sure Real doesn't like it.

The JetAudio media player software has a shoddy interface but the best sounding MP3 decoder I have ever heard, hands down! You can select between 32-bit float and 64-bit float decoding, and it supports 24-bit and 32-bit output to your soundcard.

So I bought the iAudio CW300 which comes with 512 Mb flash memory, Sennheiser MX 400 Earphones, and a whole bunch of accessories. Supposedly one AA battery lasts 30 hours (I assume if you turn the backlit display off.) It also has a microphone for recording to MP3, FM tuner that you can encode from.

I admittedly haven't tried other MP3 players, but after using JetAudio, I couldn't see many players being able to coming close to the sound quality with a standard Fraunhofer decoder.

I currently use the free version of JetAudio. I like it because it plays all the RealMedia and Windows types without having to have multiple players installed. The only catch is that you have to have the codecs installed, so you may need to get the players, then remove them.

Kame

Check out Helix's helix-client site. There've been some early developer release binaries available for quite some time.

For real world use, you're probably better off using something like mplayer w/ the realplayer-codecs or if you're using Windows, something like JetAudio, or as others have mentioned, Media Player Classic + Real codecs

I use JetAudio to play Real audio / video files. It doesn't work as a plugin (I think) but I just save the files to my HD then play them back later. It's SO worth it not to have that ad-ware annoying piece of CRAP on my system. This program has no ads and lots of features I never use. It's not annoyned me or poped up anything after 5 months.

FREE Real Audio/Video Player

It also plays other formats, but I usually use Winamp for everything else.

Check out Media Player Classic or jetAudio.
Both player are able to handle all DirectShow codecs (incl DivX) as well as RealMedia, QuickTime, and also DVDs.
jetAudio installs the RealMedia codecs, but no QuickTime codecs. Media Player Classic installs no codecs at all (that's why it's so small).