Rating: 
Summary: Everyday user. Pros and Cons. Hard to organize.
Review: Got it about a month ago. Added a 256MB memory card. A cheaper choice for Mac. I use it everyday, including while working out...fairly satisfied.Pros
1.Battery life
2.Light weight.
3.Easy to use.
4.Works with Mac (better price than iPod) and PC
5.Expandable
6. Very good audio quality. Cons
1.iTunes always crash when I try to add a big group of songs. It also takes a while when you want to erase a song. 2.Every time I add a song the entire list is updated. And the process is slow. 3. I though that I would be able to search my playlist (rock, hip hop, classic, etc) on my mp3 but only gives me 2 choices. Play from a certain song or the entire list. Kind of a nightmare when you have more than 80 songs in it. 4. Cannot organize songs order after I added to the device. Even from the list that appears on the software. 5. Buttons have a slow response. 6. Radio reception kept really bad even after upgrade.
Rating: 
Summary: Too much shock to the player?
Review: I've had this player for quite some time now, about 10 months. I purchased it here, on Amazon, the manufacturer is Rio, and my comments are as follows: POSITIVE
1) Small and light.
2) Sufficient memory storage capacity (although more is good).
3) Easy to use (both player and transfer of music between the player and the computer). NEGATIVE
1) Extremely static electricity-sensitive, especially during winter time. For instance, I would wear my player attached to my leather belt. If I would try to unlock my door with a key that is metallically tied to my belt, a static charge would send the player in a state of shock; it would either stop playing and you have to restart it or it would interrupt the current song. This is a big problem. So, not to mention its behavior if you're undressing in winter time - as you rub your clothes against one another you generate charge and it also turns out to have the same effect on the player.
2) For unknown reasons the player introduced high-pitched squeeking noise in the middle of music replay. That happened only perhaps 3 or 4 times in 10 months, so it may not be too big of a deal.
3) If you're thinking about using this player while jogging, grab another pair of headphones which you can anneal around your ear. These headphones will keep popping out as you run.
4) My Rio ceased to work properly after 10 months, for reasons unknown. I suspect that it has to do with the above static electricity issue so that every time I turn the player on and press ANY button on it, it simply restarts itself. However, it seems that Rio has agreed to replace the player for me even though the warranty is only 90 days or so. Overall, do consider buying another player. This is something that is worth spending a few extra bucks on to avoid above problems.
Rating: 
Summary: Do not buy this if you're statically charged.
Review: This is the worst piece of electronics I've ever seen - in terms of its sensitivity to static electricity. Every creature on Earth is statically charged, especially during winter time when air humidity is low. I wear this player on my belt (which is made out of leather) and the moment I touch a lock of my door with my key (which is tied to my belt), the player restarts itself, as if a shock just hit it.
The newest problem (and seemingly an irreparable one) is that I left the player in my jacket for a few days. I haven't touched it, it worked perfectly fine...until all of a sudden it shuts down the moment I press ANY button on it. It simply restarts itself. Why? Beats me. This is terrible. I hope they'll replace it. If not, I'll never buy anything from Sonicblue or Rio again. I basically wasted my money and the lifetime of this toy was far too short (bought in March 2003, died in February 2004).
Rating: 
Summary: Easy to use, With a lot of features.... Great MP3 Player!!!
Review: Not too expensive, but with a lot of features. Its small and compact. Comes with a case that has a belt clip. It comes with 128MB of memory which is enough for about 35 songs and can be upgraded up to 256MB. It downloads the songs very fast (about 5 seconds per song) and the software is easy to use. The headphones that come with it are pretty good, but can break easily. I recommend upgrading them to Koss "The Plug" Portable Stereophones. Also if you use normal headphones, then the volume might not be very high. The batter life is great. It comes with a charger and and one rechargable battery. It takes a couple of hours to charge fully and is good to go for a while. You can also use a standard AA battery. The radio is okay, you can set 6 presets, but the recption is not the greatest... but better than nothing. Also if you're traveling to Europe the radio should work there as well. The player has 6 equalizers: Normal, Rock, Jazz, Classical, Pop, and Trance or you can customize your own. You can also set up to 9 bookmarks. The player also supports both MP3 and WMA. It also has a clock and it also tells the day of the week. You can also choose from it counting down of how much of the song is left, or how much of the song is played. It also has a stop watch. The software can let you edit the ID3 tags (the information that contains, the name of song and artist and ablum) so it can show up on the mp3 player. Overall this a very good MP3 player, if you want the volume at its highest then buy good quality earphones, not headphones. Also if you have a lot of songs to store, then I would go with the Ipod or the Archos, because even after upgrading it to its fullest memory, it will only hold about 70 songs. But for me thats enough. This will make an awesome gift for teenagers.
Rating:
Summary: AWESOME MP3 Player
Review: I was looking and looking for a new Mp3 player, something not overly expensive like the Ipod but something with at least 128mb on board memory and upgradeable. Now with it being on sale here on Amazon.com its prolly the only Mp3 player id recommend to buy. The sound quality was supreme i really wasnt expecting much but i was surprised by how nice it sounded. Prolly the easiest software ive used. all you do is pop in your cd, install, plug the player into the usb and the transfer is clean quick and best of all easy. I didnt even know this thing had an FM tuner with it when i bought it. I came acrossed it browsing the easy to use menu. It also had an equilizer and i thought that was pretty cool as well. Pros.
It very light weight.
128 Mb on board and upgradable another 128MB with smart media cards.
Had an FM tuner
Great sound Cons.
the only thing i could think of mention would be the packaging. But we all know how the manufactures love to seal things up so its almost impossible to open. But nothing a utility knife couldnt handle. Performance of transfer will vary depending on your PC for me it only took like a minute to load 128mb worth of MP3, i also have 1 gig of ram and a fairly decent processor so dont be quick to judge because of other peoples computer problems. also. the FM tuner isnt that bad, but i live in teh city. I really was expecting the FM to be nothin but static from reading these reviews, but to my pleasant suprise all 5 of my favorite stations came in clear and good nough to listen to. definately a 5 star product and worth the buy.
Rating:
Summary: I love my Rio! :)
Review: I've had my rio for almost a year now and I love it. I have never had a problem with it. The sound is great and the eq works really well. The menu is very easy to use. It even has a hold mode so you can't push the buttons by accident. The software is very easy to use it just finds all your music and you just select it and download them to the player which happens in a few minutes. I have never been shocked by mine nor has it ever skipped. I have a 256mb card inside it so I'm up to 384 which is like 85-88 tracks. If you get a larger card then you'll have even more storage. What I like to do is get cheap low mb card and copy whole cds to them and carry around a few cards. The only down side is the radio doesn't have very good reception. It does work great occasionally. Oh and the earbuds aren't that great but who hasn't bought a player of some sort the didn't come with a crappy head set. So if you want a radio with your mp3 player that this is not the one for you but if you don't mind then go pick this one up.
Rating: 
Summary: A well designed, likeable MP3 player (Mac perspective)
Review: Pros:
Integration with iTunes (Mac), Design and Build Quality, Belt Holster, Battery Performance Cons:
poor radio reception, no audible.com support, no Apple Music Store (AAC) support Details:
I have the Rio s50 (same product as the s35s, just different plastics and rechargable AA instead of the AAA) I borrowed an iPod for month and fell in love with it but couldn't justify the expense, didn't like the scratch-sensitive case, would have to upgrade my Mac to get Firewire, and was a little leery of long-term reliability (hard drive and sealed battery). Here's why the S10 is a great mp3 player...
- MP3 audio quality is excellent to my untrained ear
- Really small and solid, fits great in the hand
- Front panel controls feel solid and give good tactile feedback
- Excellent s50 padded belt holster includes a nice spring clip, protection for all 6 sides, and allows full control of unit (even recharging)...I haven't seen the s35s holster
- iTunes is wonderful...lots of features for organizing music and the smart playlist feature chooses a random 128mb set of songs from my collection so I never need to decide what I'm going to transfer. Implemented using an iTunes "plugin" so I should be able to maintain compatibility with future releases of iTunes.
- AA batteries are cheap and easy to find...in case I need to swap out the included NiHi AA cell on the road.
- Software upgradable via iTunes Some drawbacks:
- iTunes integration is great but not perfect...you have to launch iTunes after connecing the Rio and if you try to drag too many songs on the Rio I got a series of errors and had to relaunch both Rio and iTunes.
- Backlighting is a little dimmer than I expected but quite usable
- Radio reception isn't great (most stations have a noticable hiss, even here in Silicon Valley)...just good enough to be useful but if this is going to irritate you get the cheaper S10 instead and live without it.
- You probably want to get better headphones, the included set feels nice but my $25 Koss' sound a whole lot better.
- 128mb capactity is still not much space if you have a lot of medium bitrate MP3s and SD memory is a little more expensive than SmartMedia and CF (but seems to be the emerging standard). If you need to store >2hrs of songs, add an SD card (note: depending on market conditions, the S10 may offer a better price/capacity ratio...if it weren't for the Best Buy sale I would've bought an S10 with a 256mb SD card and given up the rechargable battery and radio/clock/stopwatch features)
- Although earlier Rio players supported Audible.com content this model doesn't appear to handle this file format (dragging audible files from iTunes to the Rio is ignored)
- Don't plan on using a standard USB cord, this unit uses a proprietary cord (since this unit doesn't mount as a USB drive this isn't a big deal for me since I'm only connecting to my iTunes machine anyway)
Rating:
Summary: Absolute best player in its weight range.
Review: I needed an MP3 player light enough for jogging, with long battery life, user friendly interface and at least as much memory as my previous favorite (Intel Pocket Concert 128Mb) - and this player delivered. Since portable music is important enough for me that I set an open budget, I did consider the IPOD and other hard-drive based players - but those are all too heavy. (the lightest 5mb Ipod is about 6.5 ounces ). This one is so light, depending on what kind of battery, it is probably bit over 3 ounces. The light, padded carrying pouch with belt clip is also very useful - you won't even need to put the buttons in lock mode, since they're accessible yet well protected when on the run. The supplied in-ear headphones deliver surprising good quality sound even when compared to brand-name equivalents (Aiwa, Panasonic, and Sony ones I bought for up to $20) Then comes the fun part - tricking it out. First, I upgraded the firmware to version 1.2. With this, it will take SD (Secure Digital) cards of up to 256 Mb (as stated in the firmware documentation - who knows it might even take 512 Mb cards, but I decided to play it safe ), not just the MultiMedia cards as the manual and website state ( as far as I can tell MM cards are only available up to 128Mb ) Not only did it accept my 256Mb Sandisk SD card - almost tripling total memory to whopping 370 Mb - the S50 loads music files into this card more than twice as fast as it does into the internal 128Mb ! To make it perfect for running or working out, replace the single included rechargeable battery temporarily with an Energizer PhotoLithium battery which while expensive and non-rechargeable, is feather-light and lasts pretty much forever. The music uploading software is simple and does its job admirably. Since the SD card is so fast, it uploads songs about as fast as I can pick them out from my library. Any cons ? The design is uninspring. But so what - the best looking mp3 player in my opinion is still the Philips Rush which under WinXP is completely unusable because of utter lack of software support. And I do miss the little scroll wheel that made navigating a large list of songs so easy on my Intel Pocket Concert. But that is offset by the fact that the skip back-or-forward-to-next-song buttons react quickly, much better than the ones on the Pocket Concert. Also, the player has reset itself on two mp3's so far that played fine in winamp, most likely due to non-standard encoding issues. But such is the risk of running downloaded mp3's from unknown origins, and I have a lot of faith that with the ability to upgrade the firmware, the compatibility of this player with the various file formats is and will remain up to par with the best ones out there. The bottom line: buy this player, expand its memory if you can afford to, and forget the many 'cool' looking competitors out there. This one is the most useful, unless you need your entire collection stuffed in a not-quite-portable, expensive hard-drive based device.
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your money
Review: A piece of junk. Had mine for just over a year and the on/off switch and the DC input broke. Customer support for Rio is a technical answering service in India, good luck. They won't replace it. Now it's worthless after owning it for only a year.
Rating:
Summary: Best MP3 Short of and IPOD
Review: This player has EVERYTHING that you need in an MP3! I believe I've got 5 full CD's at a time in the "built in" memory, which should be plenty for anyone. The software is extremely simple, and I'd say it takes me <5 minutes to erase the player and enter a whole new set of music. This was the part of using an MP3 that I was hesitant about before purchasing the RIO, but I've been pleasantly surprised. Aside from ease of use, and sufficiency of the built in memory (not to mention that it is expandable), this player has every other feature you could want. The backlight is key, and you shouldn't waste your money on a player without that feature! The leather case is always on my player, because it not only protects the hardware, but it looks better too (has it's own belt clip). The FM player is also hugely convenient for anyone with radio tuners on their Fitness Centers' Television sets! (other than that, you won't get much reception aside from 1/2 dozen local stations).
I couldn't be happier with the value of this player. Sounds great, totally affordable (I paid ~$95 12/03) and incredibaly convenient.
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