Rating: 
Summary: Quality issues
Review: I have generally enjoyed this player (quirks about the layout of the buttons notwithstanding), when it works. I have had to send it back to Creative three times at about $7 a pop for different reasons (a stuck button, audio cutting out, display cutting out, volume control only going up). Generally, support has been of little help until badgered into giving me an RMA. The last time, I sent it back I was told I would receive a new player. I have no way of knowing for sure that the player is "new" or "refurbished" (they said it would _not_ be refurbished), but judging from the condition of the case, I'm a bit suspicious. The player, however, is having problems with the display cutting out. Aside from that, it functions normally, but if this is a "new" player, and given my problems with the last player, I would be wary of their quality control.
Rating: 
Summary: 1 year later and still working great...
Review: I honestly felt compelled to write this after reading many of the other reviews. It seems that everyone out there rating the product high has "just got it this morning" and everyone else seems to be complaining about repairs and such.Well, my case is different. I bought my Nomad II MG a little over a year ago along with a friend of mine. We got them at the same time, from the same store and with an extra 64MB (total 128MB). I use the unit every day while going to and from the office (at least 2 hours a day). In my experience, the battery will not last more than 5-6 hours (they say 8). Having said that, I have not had to replace the battery. Let me get the bad out of the way first...
- The buttons are extremely sensitive. After a while, I wound up locking up the unit and just let it run on random.
- Random logic seems "not so random".
- Controls are not intuitive and take some getting used to.
- SmartMedia card will sometimes stop working. Shutdown, remove and replace usually solves this.
- The headphones are horrible! Extremely uncomfortable! I wound up buying Sony Phonotopia.
- There was a shutdown problem while docked which was solved when I upgraded firmware. If after reading the previous list you think I hate this unit, think again... I love it! This unit is extremely light, small and portable. You can carry it in a shirt pocket. Easy to carry in any season.
If you get the 128MB total, you have an average 2 hours of music to go along with you. Got tired of the same music? Switch to the FM tuner and you're good to go. (or switch to 96kbps sampling rate and cram more songs in)
This unit has great sound. I also found it to be loud enough for my taste. I always use sound level at 30 (50 max). For the record, the sync software is very easy to use... My friend has had the same experience with this MP3 player as I have. We're both very happy with it and I would buy it again in a heartbeat.
Rating: 
Summary: I JUST COULDN'T BE HAPPY WITH ANYTHING LESS
Review: Whilst i was deciding which digital audio player to buy, i just thought to myself, i want the best. Thats just what this is. It is the best. Creative have a great track record for digital audio players, everyone knows that the jukebox is the ONLY good hard drive dap, and this flashy little magnesium cased mg is no exception to their record. It is easy to use and a pleasure to own. You say it has limited storage space? Buy a 128mb flash card, if you can afford this player you should be able to afford the flash. My only dissapointment with this player is its anoying built in feature to shut down when it is locked. I cant turn it on when its in its pouch using the remote because i keep it locked. Im buying the new LCD remote and ive got my fingers crossed that the firmware with it may cancel this out. If creative can fix this minor hitch, then no one can dispute that this player simply is the best. So far i have never run out of batteries. I just put it on its handy little desktop docking station every night when i get home and chose what tracks i want for the follwing day. It is amazing what a difference a small docking station can make in ease of use, no fidling with cables ever day, just place it in and im ready to go, both usb and charger cables are hooked up to the back of the small station. I hardly use the provided software, i just use winamp, which it works perfectly with. Sometimes i use the software to edit time and radio stations quickly, which i find is very handy. I have taken this thing everywhere with me and i love it. I spent a long time reasearching dap's before i bought this one and i am positive i got one of the best ones out there. For peace of mind that you have got what you need (and more) just buy this player.
Rating:
Summary: One of the best buys of 2000
Review: Yesterday, while working out, it suddenly occured to me that the Nomad II MG was probably one of my best buys (I actually received it as a gift) of 2000. The main reasons for me are:
- Easy and fast syncronization with the PC though a cradle
- Re-chargeable batteries (through the cradle)
- Small size and light weight
- Easy to use and good 'block' feature
- Good software to be used even without Nomad player
- Extra goody: supports radio and taping of voice - what else yould you ask for?
- 'Show-off' value when showing friends ;-) So for me, I am all around happy with this one.
Rating: 
Summary: As good as flash-based players get, but...
Review: I really wanted to like this mp3 player, and it worked well for just over a year. I bought mine right when they first came out, and until yesterday, I'd have said it was a great mp3 player.
I listened to mine literally everyday. Walking to and from class, and while jogging, it was fantastic. The FM tuner is a definite plus--keeps you from getting too bored with the limited number of mp3's you can store.
The problem is that I bought the MG over the regular Nomad II for the added durability I thought a magnesium case would give, but it has turned out not to be so protective. I bought it to replace my already-at-the-time ancient Rio PMP 300, which had a horrible battery cover design that finally broke altogether on me. The annoying flaw in the MG's design (in my experience) is that the outer edges--where all the buttons are--is plastic. So hypothetically, if you were to drop your MG on the ground, there is nothing to keep the sides from getting bashed in, bending the button switches attached to the circuitboard. When one of these is bent (hypothetically, of course), your only recourse is to open up the case, voiding your 90-day warranty, to bend the button switch back. Do this a few times, and pop goes your switch. This is especially bad if the switch broken is the "play/pause" button, making you unable to turn your MG on.
And if you're thinking of getting the vanilla Nomad or Nomad II, you should know that those players' LCD's have a tendency to break--you should see what happened to my roommate's Nomad--and, surprise, surprise, the LCD is (A) not covered by the warranty and (B) costs well over $100 to replace.
Is someone going to make a truly durable mp3 player one of these days, not that I'll be able to afford it? My experience so far is that the life of these luxury toys (let's face it) is about one year... Is that worth it to you?
Rating:
Summary: Nice Product . . . when it works
Review: I'll preface this by saying that I'm extremely upset with the current situation. I was riding my bike, listening to the Nomad, when I was caught in the rain. The player stopped working, but didn't have any outward signs of damage. I called the support line and he told me that it most likely had some condensation that was making the buttons stick and it needed to dry out. Well after 72 hours, it still did not work. I was then informed that a little rain was an "Act of God" and would void the warranty. OK, I thought, fair enough. I'll pay to have it sent in and looked at. So I paid the $30 and hoped that the fix would be relatively painless and inexpensive. Fast forward a month. I called up support and was informed that the player had to be completely replaced because they suspected that it had been tampered with. As if I would attempt to fix the thing myself or something. So now I'm $150 poorer, on top of the $250 I paid for the player. Bottom line, the player isn't worth $400. As a side note, their support people are pretty nice.
Rating:
Summary: Great Small MP3 Player
Review: This unit has travelled the world in the 5 months I have had it with zero problems. The size is perfect, unlike the jukebox which is bulky and doesn't fit into a pocket. It also last long. Get another 128mb card and you have 3 hours+ of music - and the batteries last that long and longer. I have zero complaints and will probably buy a second unit for my girlfriend who keeps taking mine.
Rating: 
Summary: UNRELIABLE
Review: Right features, bad design [bad] quality for [a high price] I would have appreciated more than a couple of months of use. Stay away from this unit and buy the next generation.
Rating:
Summary: Great Player When it Works
Review: I have only owned the Nomad II MG and I loved it at first - the sound is great, the software is simple to use and it's small enough to take to the gym and run with. After a few weeks one of the batteries stopped making contact and the player wouldn't work. I sent it back to Creative Labs to be fixed and purchased a new one to have as a back up. The new one that came had the same battery contact problem after one week. I have since sent that one back and am now searching for a new model. I don't recommend the purchase of the Nomad II MG until they correct the battery contact problems.
Rating:
Summary: Everything I was looking for in an MP3 player
Review: I purchased this after reading nearly all of the reviews here, as well as reviews of the Nomad IIc, the Rio 800 64MB, and the Nomad II. Some of the reviews here, notably the comments about the battery contacts breaking, scared me, but I noticed that only about 5 of 47 reviewers mentioned it, which made me think that not everyone's encountering those problems - probably just those that swapped batteries a bit. I knew I would be recharging almost daily and would rarely need to swap. When you buy it, you do have to put the rechargable batteries in, and it seems a little stiff, but I got them in OK and I am going to leave them there unless I end up on a long trip without a recharger. Anyway, I've had it a week now, and here's my attempt at a comprehensive review to save others the trouble of reading ALL the ones I did.
For starters, sound quality is excellent. I've never even used the headphones supplied, which I think is what most people are reacting to -- with a pair of fairly good third-party headphones it sounds as good as I would want. I do wish it had an equalizer built into the hardware - sometimes I want to bump the bass up or down. The memory is adequate for a good amoutn of music, and it's very cool that you can expand it to 192 MB with extra memory cards. I plan to buy another 64 and be very happy at 128 MB. Also, it's so small, I couldn't believe it. I'm sure they'll get even smaller, but this is a little smaller than a deck of cards - that's pretty cool.
The FM tuner is a great feature, and reception is just fine for me - I've experienced none of the problems getting a stereo signal others mentioned, and you don't need to use the headphones shipped with the MG to use the radio (one reviewer said the antenna was built into the headphones, which isn't true). The interface for programming a new station sucks if you want to add a new one after doing the Autoscan, but you only have to do it once. The interface throughout is not intuitive in any way, so this was one of the few electronic products I've ever bought where I had to refer to the manual to figure out how to do almost everything. But I only had to look at the manual once and then I got it. If you hate programming your VCR clock, though, you'll really hate using the MG.
I see what some people are saying about the buttons on the side, but just be sure to use the "lock" feature whenever you're stuffing it in your pocket. One real dawback there is that it's hard to unlock it when holding it in one hand, you'll tend to press buttons as you do it. Annoying. but... the flipside is it looks very nice with no buttons on the front, and slips even more easily into pockets and the like as a result.
The display screen is excellent - tiny but just big enough, and very sharp. Yeah, the MP3 song info just scrolls once like other reviewers mentioned, but then it defaults to the name of the song, which is usually what you want to see anywway . I mean, c'mon - you put the song there - you should know who did it and what it's called. The whole point of these things is listening to your favorite music, making your own playlists.
The product works very well with iTunes for the Mac, though I wish you could reorder your playlists in the iTunes interface. If you can, I haven't figured out how. It seems to kind of work by "slots" - if you delete song 3 and put a new song on the player, it'll go into slot 3 and reallocate any remaining memory. I've already taken to making a whole 64MB whole playlist in iTunes, getting it just perfect, and then throwing the whole thing over to the MG en masse (which only takes about a minute - faster than other players).
Finally, voice recording works well and is very cool, although even a tiny external speaker would be cool for that feature - you have to listen to yourself over the headphones.
One last thing: some reviewer bemoaned the choice of NiMH batteries for this, saying that they "build memory" and it made him not want to recharge him. don't listen to that guy. It's NiCAD batteries that have the memory problem - not NiMH.you can recharge these to your heart's content. don't believe me, just do a google search on NiMH and charge memory. Don't worry.
I hope this is helpful. I'd never bought an MP3 player before, but have played with every model of the Rio (still likng the 500 the best) that friends have owned as well as the HipZip. Quibbles notwithstanding, i like the MG much more than those others mentioned. I'd give it another half star if I could, reserving 5 stars for that perfect MP3 player with a nice design and intuitive interface that still hasn't come, but that I also don't feel the need to wait for.
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