Rating: 
Summary: Lyra vs. Zen vs. iPod: A 40GB MP3 Player Guide
Review: I've owned all three 40GB players available today: Creative Zen, RCA Lyra, Apple iPod. This is the review I wish I had read before I started shopping. It was a originally more comprehensive but I had to trim it to 1000 words. For the most part, the Creative Zen has the best features of the three, as well as the best price. It sounds like a no brainer except for the fact that these things break like crazy! If you read some of the other reviews on here, you'll see a few people mention that their headphone jack shorted out when they dropped the player....well mine shorted out while the player was sitting on my desk not moving at all. I don't know a single person who bought one of these players and didn't have their headphone jack malfunction! Many reviewers suggest buying an extended warranty because of this problem. I would most definitely agree with them on that one, but personally I don't have the patience to wait a few weeks every time the player decides to stop working. Those warrantees are supposed to be purchased just in case something goes wrong; not because something most likely will! The Lyra from the moment it came out of the box to the moment it stopped working for no apparent reason, four hours later, was on the whole a piece of junk. That said...on to the comparisons. PRICE: As just about every anti-iPod reviewer mentions, THE IPOD IS MORE EXPENSIVE AND DOES PRETTY MUCH THE SAME THING. The iPod is basically the BMW of mp3 players...the other mp3 player work like, and cost about as much as a Kia. They all do basically the same thing, but the cheaper ones are cheaper for a reason! SIZE: All three players are smaller than a walkman, so it's kind of silly to even discuss this, but it seems to be a hot topic in the other reviews. From largest to smallest the players are ranked as follows: Lyra, Zen, iPod. The Lyra is the only one of the three which will not fit easily in your pocket. It is the widest /longest /heaviest of the bunch, and personally, I hated the way it felt in my hand. The Zen and the iPod were both a pleasure to hold. CONTROLS/NAVIGATION: iPod gets first place here simple because it's touch sensitive navigation wheel allows you to get from the first album in your collection to the last in seconds and it stops on a dime anywhere in between. The Zen's controls are very good however it takes longer to scroll through your entire collection and when it really starts moving fast, it continues scrolling after you release the button sometimes skipping past another 50-75 albums! The Lyra had decent navigation, but the buttons had to be pushed more than once before they responded almost half of the time! The Zen and the iPod can be operated easily with one hand. PLAYLISTS/SONG RATING: The Zen wins here without a doubt. It is the only one of the three where you can create, edit (even while it's playing) and SAVE multiple play lists on the player itself without connecting it to a computer. The iPod allows you to make ONE play list on the fly, which cannot be edited or saved.
The Lyra allows you to tag songs you like or don't like and it makes play lists of each...yes, it makes a playlist of songs that you tell it you DO NOT LIKE...if that doesn't explain what's wrong with this product, nothing will! The iPod allows you to rate songs 1-5 stars on the player, and then make a play list automatically based on those ratings when connected to a computer.
BATTERY: Again, Zen is the winner here. Not only does it offer a battery that lasts 14 hours instead of iPod and Lyra's 8 hour batt. it is also the only player of the three where you can remove and replace the battery when it deteriorates with age as all rechargeables do. It should be noted that the battery times I listed are the official times given by the manufacturers. The Zen actually lasts about 10 hours the other two go between 5 and 6 before needing a charge. SCREEN: The Zen not only has the biggest screen of the bunch, it also scrolls the album title in the directory screen allowing you to see the whole thing instead of just the first few words. TRANSFER TO PLAYER: All three units use USB 2.0, the iPod also can be used with Firewire. TRANSFER FROM PLAYER: The Zen allows you to transfer music freely from your player to any computer loaded with it's software. The iPod does not allow this however third party software that can be purchased and used to pull songs from the iPod. In all honest, the Lyra broke before I could find out if you can pull songs off of it. </P> SOFTWARE: iTunes is easy to use and offers tons of ways to organize your music. Creative Media Manager takes a lot of getting used to but is decent once you figure it out. Musicmatch, which comes with the Lyra is garbage. It's slow, difficult to figure out at times, and constantly badgers you to buy the upgrade to its premium version. EXTRAS: The only one that actually has extra features is the iPod which comes loaded with 4 different games, the ability to read text documents that are stored on the hard drive on the player's screen, a date book, and an address book. The Lyra's ONLY advantage over the other players is the fact that it comes with a complete car kit (charger/tape adapter)....which is pretty nice, but useless when the player turns itself into a paperweight after just a few hours. All three players come with a case....iPod's is the only one which does not give you access to the player's controls when it's in the case.
Hope this helped.
Rating: 
Summary: Love it, but if you're on Windows, it could be improved...
Review: Don't get me wrong, I'm an iPod fan. I am. At least, I really, really want to be. OK, I love the way the iPod works and looks and plays once my music is in there, but there are some shortcomings. Really, the biggest problem for me is that it has no idea how to handle multi-user environment in Windows XP. If my wife signs on to her account in our home office, my iPod asks her if she wants to erase my music and replace it with hers. It should know that I'm not signed on, and that the iPod is mine and not her's. Better yet, it should know that the two of us share the same music, although I'm sure the music industry wouldn't be happy with a husband and wife doing this, right? I decided that I didn't want iTunes to pop up and update when the iPod's in the dock and she's signed on, so I configured it. Naturally, I now need to update manually. I can get around these problems, but if Apple put as much thought into moving the iPod to Windows as it did into all of the fancy packaging, I'd have no troubles. I'm hopeful that they'll fix this. [A MONTH LATER] After a month of owning my iPod, I now realize that iTunes is the weak link in the whole equation. The iPod is a superstar, behavior-changing product. iTunes is very basic and doesn't have the kind of robust organizational functionality one would expect. Think about it: you have 10,000 plus songs to manage and organize, but very little database functionality beyond basic searching and sorting. Once you've got your 500 plus CD collection in there, plus all the music you've downloaded, creating a large playlist is an existential pain. You spend half your time searching around through a seemingly endless directory of titles, artists and albums. I'd love it if iTunes asked you if you wanted multiple copies of the same song in a playlist. I'd love it if I could click on a song and find out which playlists I'd put it in. Sadly, none of that exists. In a world in which Apple is thought of as being ahead of the curve, iTunes seems a bit behind. That said, I'm sure they know it and are working to improve it.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing Product, but Not Perfect
Review: After getting my whole music collection onto my computer and transfering it to my iPod, I can't tell you how proud I was to be able to carry all of those great tunes in my pocket. The design is so simple, yet has some great features and is very easy to use once you get the hang of it. This learning curve is like 10 minutes. A few things about this product are a bit misleading, however. Although the iPod is marked as being 40 GB, you can only use about 37GB of this space. For a music freak like myself, that means a lot. The most important however is battery life. I have read a lot of poor reviews on battery life of the iPod and unfortunately they are true. I can't recall getting more than 6 hours of battery life out of my iPod when it is suggested to give 8 hours. One of the things they suggest is not to jump from one track to another, put the light on, or use many of the other extra features that are available. I hardly consider this a good solution to the problem. I am sure Apple will solve this problem in time, but until then I strongly suggest spending an extra 50 dollars for the extended warranty. You never know when this battery may die on you.
Rating: 
Summary: extremely disappointed
Review: Initially I was impressed with the ipod but the honeymoon is over. I will spare you the rest of my review by telling you that the hard drive fried after two weeks of use and getting it replaced from apple is a nightmare. After spending almost a week loading up almost a thousand tracks as .wav files the ipod starting acting up. First "rebooting" seemed to solve the problem but then all kinds of funky things started to happen until finally the dreaded folder icon appeared and the unit was toast. The continuous grinding sound coming from the hard drive was pretty much all I needed to hear. I pried the unit open and discovered an off the shelf toshiba hard drive that retails for a couple of hundred bucks. I wonder how much apple is paying for them? The battery never lasted more than five hours contrary to apple's claims of eight hours. I was also unhappy to learn that no audio files can be transferred off the ipod back onto another drive. I guess Jobs needed to suck up to the record companies to launch itunes. The itunes software is alright but doesn't do anything particularly well. No crossfades for example. The user manual that comes with the ipod is for morons only. It provides no real information and doesn't even show you the icon that pretty much means you are hooped. Lot of style over substance basically. I know lots of people "love" their ipods but this is one of the absolute worst purchases that I have ever made. Don't say you weren't warned. I have no one to blame but myself though...I was seduced by the nice design. My other choice was the iRiver 40 gigger and that is next on my list, although I am going to make sure they don't use the same cheezy HD from Toshiba that infests the ipod.
Rating: 
Summary: Undeserved Hype: Why Not Someone Else (with Cheaper Prices)?
Review: Ok. I'm going to keep this simple. The iPod is a very nice player with great features- but I really think there are much better alternatives. Lets compare the Dell DJ 20GB model and the 20GB iPod. 1st there is the $150 price difference favoring the Dell.Then there's compatibilty with the Windows WMA format, which allows nearly 2x the storage space for similar quality songs. Or Dell's 250% better battery life? Or Dell's built in voice recorder? I have both products and am much happier overall with the Dell. The 2 stars are based on camparison on other products. Here's some info: Dell- Pros
Cheaper, Better compression, More compatibilty, More battery life, Intuitive controls, Better data file tansfer, Durable
Cons
Larger, Lacks docking station, lacks Alarm Clock feature iPod- Pros
Smaller, Better transfer software, Plays games?!?!?!
Cons
Easily scartchable back surface,Expensive, Windows Problems, No WMA files For ALL Windows users- "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell." Mac users, you gotta switch.
Rating:
Summary: Do your homework first!
Review: I am writing this review to help keep someone else from going through what I did. I am a heavy-duty MP3 user. I have about 10GB of music stored on my laptop and a 192MB iRock MP3 Player (64MB on board, 128MB Smart Media Card). I run quite regularly and enjoy listening to music while running. As you can imagine I was constantly changing the music on my iRock, which was beginning to be a pain. I have a number of friends who have iPods and I was fascinated with the devices. None of my friends had an iPod with a capacity greater than 20GB but I knew the form factor was the same and that the 40GB was just slightly heavier. One critical aspect that the iPod needed to meet was being able to fit into my armband carrier. Ages ago when I got the iRock I bought a Family Radio System (FRS) Receiver (i.e. Walkie-Talkie) band from Radio Shack that made running with the player a breeze. The iPod did fit the sleeve so I was pretty sure it would work out great for me. Then the day comes when my 40GB iPod arrives. Having never felt a non-tethered 40GB-er I was surprised that it was noticeably heavier than the 20GB version (Ping #1 - While the iPod has an incredible capacity it is not without a trade-off and going from a 2oz Flash Player to a 6oz Disk based player is a huge step. The weight difference is clearly obvious). This did not deter me though as the available space made me salivate. Within 15 minutes of removal from the packaging I noticed a scratch on the shiny chrome back of my iPod. I was shocked. All I did was lay it down on my desk! (Ping #2 - The iPod itself is incredibly delicate. You must handle it with kid gloves. A protective sleeve is a must). The final true test came when I took it out for a run. I am a fairly intense runner and usually average around an 8:30-9:00 minute pace per mile in my daily runs. I was absolutely flabbergasted when the iPod just all of a sudden quit playing. I set up a block of songs from a particular artist, slid the Hold button over to lock the player, and took off. When I stopped running to see what happened (irritating enough), I found that the iPod had reset itself to the initial top menu option of selecting songs by artist. The iPod also stopped playing one time while I was simply walking on the street with it nestled in my coat pocket! (Ping #3 - A disk drive based player, be it a 1.8" Drive, 1" Microdrive, or Cornice Storage Device, is a disk drive at heart and will skip and stop if vibrations or movement reaches a certain threshold.) As a final note, I know that many people love the dial pad feature for navigating though menus and the audio files but I personally thought it was irritating. If you have a lot of music you will be spending a lot of time going round and round! So now here is my advice. If you have a ton of music and you do not intend to exercise with it the iPod is a good choice. BUT if you ever intend to run or workout you might encounter the issues I faced. If at all possible borrow a friend's iPod first, so you can get a good feeling and comfort level with the device (I know, good luck getting a friend to let you borrow theirs). I had the iPod for less than a week and fortunately Amazon did take it back (kudos to Amazon for such great service). Now I am looking into another solid-state player. The Rio Cali and Chiba are leading my list (they are expandable to 768MB - no iPod but a lot of music nonetheless). I just wish they had the same form factor as the Rio Nitrus.
Rating:
Summary: after much deliberation i took the plunge...
Review: and couldn't be happier with the iPod. It's everything everyone says it is. And having all my music right there beats carrying our cd's or a walkman. You can decide you want to listen to something and it's at your fingertips. A couple of caveats: (1) if you have a PC, make sure to buy the firewire/UBS2 connection when you buy your iPod, (2) it does scratch easily, but there are different types of cases to choose from, especially on the Apple Store website, (3) when loading cd's onto iTunes, some songs will come out with a slight pause in them if they elide into the next song on your cd; make sure to choose an advanced option on iTunes for joining songs together, then the pause will disappear. These are minor annoyance for such a great idea in portable music listening.
Rating:
Summary: Ipod obsessed!
Review: I love my Ipod. I'm obessed with it, actually. I have, though, had some problems and would warn against using this product with an older computer - I had to load Windows 2000 (I had Millenium) and then it wasn't the right version (even though it says it's compatible with Windows 2000) and then I had to get XP. Now, I'm finding it unsettling to have so much music in my Ipod that is NOT backed up on my computer due to it's low memory. So, if at all possible, have a large hard drive and/or newer computer and/or a Mac so messing with operating systems and such is not an issue. I would if I had more disposable income. Also, the instructional booklet - though I don't generally consult such things - is very brief. That said, none of this takes away from the fact that I've basically been like a kid at Christmas since I got this thing. I've even taken a day or two off from work to load it up. I have about 2500 songs on it and that's half of my entire music collection - and the Ipod is only 1/4 full. It's really something that I belive won't be obsolete quite as soon as many other computer-y things. Basically, I think the Ipod has changed the way I think about music, how I approach listening and how/when/where I can listen. I haven't gotten speakers or a car charger yet - both of which I deem very necessary as it is not always convenient to listen through headphones AND the battery runs out way too quickly - but I plan to invest soon and would suggest it for others. I have a short attention span and love that I can skip around to different songs and listen to things I've never heard and/or haven't heard for years without the commitment of listening to an entire CD. Making playlists is fun, too. I would definitely recommend the Ipod and, by all means, go for the 40GB -- it's so worth it and satisfying to have all the music you've ever wanted/needed/owned in your pocket, in the car (hooks up to a tape player), on the beach, etc . . . It ROCKS!
Rating:
Summary: Can't say enough GREAT things!!!
Review: I just recently bought the 40 gig ipod. All I can say is WOW!!! I was upgrading from a Creative Nomad Jukebox 20 gig that was getting buggy. I had narrowed it down to the Creative Jukebox Zen 60 gig or the ipod. I had never had the problems that alot of people have had with Creative... But after reading several different reviews on different sites about the headphone jack going out and the battery cover popping off I dicided to go with the ipod. The software that came with mine was i-tunes, I also am a Windows XP user. I have never had a more flawless sync. In less than 10 minutes it was up and running!! The ease of use and feel are awesome!!! The controls are almost heat activated. The headphones that come with it are Ok but not great. I upgraded to the Shure E3c's and it is a totally different experience. One word of warning when burning your music for the first time. I had thought that there might be a problem with the output, seeing as I had to have the volume turned higher than I felt like I should for a 500.00 product. Well it wasn't until I had burned about a hundred CD's and was changing some track info that I noticed a volume slider. The slider sits by default in the middle of minus 100 - plus 100. I hit select all from edit and went to file and clicked Get info. Moved the slider all the way to plus 100 percent. Burned the CD and checked it out. I could barely turn the volume up it was so loud and full. Nothing in the instructions tell you about this. Needless to say I had to re-burn all of the CD's. Beside that I could not be more happy!!! Just remember to side the volume output up to 100 percent!!
Rating:
Summary: A Dream Come True on a PC Platform
Review: The 40GB iPod is a dream come true. It was easy to set up on a PC by utilizing the docking station (included with the iPod) and the Dock Connector to USB 2.0 + Firewire cable. To ensure the utmost in compatibility I installed the free iTunes software and started importing my CD collection of music and books. Quite rapidly I had a full range of genres to listen to on the iPod and have been adding additional media daily. Soon I will be able to completely eliminate my two Sony 200 CD juke boxes that take up lots of valuable space in my office. And the iPod shuffle feature is far more random by category than the Sony juke boxes. The battery lasts in excess of 7 hours while using Sony noice cancellation headphones for air travel - what a treat. I then purchased the Belkin microphone and have been recording business meetings. For my staff, I then produce CD copies of the recordings to ensure we are all on the same page. I have also purchased iTrip that transmits via an FM signal whatever I would like to play from my library of available media through an FM radio. This feature is especially useful when traveling and in rental cars where local stations can't be counted on to provide the music I like to listen to (I have also used it in my own car in place of my 6 CD disk changer). Finally, I found free shareware Outpod and have imported my contacts from my Microsoft Outlook into my iPod. The functionality of this device amazes me everyday. Well worth the investment if you are going to utilize its functionality to the fullest.
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