Thanks for all your recommendations, guys. I spent the last couple of hours exploring the websites you sent me to (yes, Wendy, I remember PC Pro, and I registered to see their lab tests), and I realised that I'm gonna have to compromise. :p
Ideally, I'd like the size, weight, robustness and battery life of a flash player, combined with the features and storage capacity of a hard drive player. Since that's not going to happen, I have to revise my demands. :p
I checked I-pods, and they looked really good... until I read several (many, even) reviews saying they were not compatible with WMA, and considering 90% of my MP3s are WMA files, it'd be a pain to re-rip everything from scratch.
The Iriver IHP 320 seems really, really good as far as features are concerned, but it's a bit bulkier than what I'm looking for, especially as I want to use my MP3 player to commute to and from work as well as go on long journey. So I'd really like something that fit in my jeans pocket. It's still one of my likeliest choices if I can't get a flash player that has the same kind of features.
I've looked into flash players, and Creative Line and Cowon seem to have some large capacity ones (Cowon even goes up to 2 Gb, which is the biggest capacity for a flash player), but many review sites explain that hard drive players are really, really much better in the long run.
In fact, I'd found *the* perfect flash player: the Iriver ifp 999 looked like the best compromise, PC Pro is raving about it, and there are a huge majority of excellent reviews on Cnet. But then I found several really, really negative reviews explaining that the player skips when playing WMA files and that it doesn't work as a USB mass storage (which totally contradicts what PC Pro is saying - talk about confusing!)
Microdrives seem to be a good compromise, so I have to look into that.
Thanks again for all your help!
Kaethel
