OSNews

Thanks for the review. I remember when I first got my rca 2780, I was happy with it just because of the cool factor, but after a few months I found it to be a steaming pile of ... electronics. Here's a quick rundown of my pros and cons

Pro - the quality of the ASF files recorded off TV is very good.
Con - well, its an ASF files for starters, and I couldnt ever figure out a way of ripping the stream out to be in an AVI no matter with fourCC I used. Also it doesnt actually play back most mpeg-4 content... it warns you if it fines B-frames in the stream and then proceeds to drop all of them.

Pro - It plays most mp3s
Con - It can be picky about some mp3s, and it tends to give up quickly when playing them back.

Pro - It has a battery
Con - After a few months of usage.. you'll notice your battery life quickly dwindle to about 1-2 hours for mp3 playback. That's just too little. And you can't change the battery yourself.

Pro - The read/write speeds are blazing
Con - Without some sort of annoying proprietary way for it to keep track of what mp3s are where, you have to use this library-update piece of software that scans the tags of all your mp3s and puts them in a database. Depending on the number of mp3s, this can take 1-3 minutes. Major pain.

Pro - The cable management is about as good as you can hope for (all cables suck... just some don't suck as much as the rest)
Con - The headphone jack is flimsy and if it breaks you're up a creek. Which is why I solely use mine as a portable 20 gb hdd.

You decide. I bought an Archos AV420 and it served me much better with video playback, battery life and battery swapping, durability, mp3 sorting and playlisting, etc. Just guard it with your life as mine was ripped off and dropping $500 each time it hardly worth it.