So far, I have been using an iRiver iFP 790 at the gym, and it has worked pretty ok for me. Not spectacularly well, not spectacularly poorly. Its 256MB are definitely getting to be a little small; after a year or so, it's definitely acting up: the headphone plug is noisy and doesn't grip the jacks any more; the buttons on top (not the best placement anyway) are starting to become insensitive; and the luster on the shiny red exterior is wearing off.

Oddly enough, though, it was the software that ended up costing the little device its place as MFUG (most frequently used gadget) in my household: I had devised this cool way of changing music on it, by symlinking tracks from the rip collection into a special folder, and then rsync-ing that folder to the device. To do that, of course, I needed to be able to rsync, which means I had to be able to mount the iFP.

Well, easily done: iRiver has an UMS firmware on their site. I downloaded, installed, and synced. Only to discover that the transfer rate was Wargames-modem. It would take about two days to upload a full 256MB. I sent a request to iRiver, and they kindly replied; telling everything should be fine.