My Fancy New Ogg Player

I've ranted and raved for a while about how the iPod is simply the aesthetically pleasing spawn of the devil, whose sole aim is to rob us of our hard-earned dough for substandard features, and incompatible media formats.

Unfortunately, my trusty iRiver iFP-890 died on me about 2 months ago, and I have not been able to find a replacement. Worse, the pointy-haired fools running that company have gone and sold their souls, and now don't support Ogg files, and only provide a proprietary (Windows Media Player) means of getting music on and off their devices.

So after wandering hither and yon and reading countless technical specifications in Korean, my replacement is here at last! The Cowon iAudio 7. Features that matter to me the most:

• Plays Ogg Vorbis. Even at the insanely high bit-rate (256kbps) that I encode my CDs to.
• Mounts as a standard VFAT filesystem under Linux. And because of this, it hooks nicely into Amarok from which I can drag/drop music, podcasts, etc.
• 8GB of flash memory storage. No spinning hard drives, so I get (supposedly --- I haven't tested) 60 hours of continuous playback time.
• Integrated FM radio.
• Records from integrated mic, line-in, and FM.

The only glitch? I had to return mine for a replacement because (and you're not going to believe this), there was a hair trapped under the screen. Yup. I kid you not. I didn't notice it at first, but when trying out the image-viewing features, I noticed it in stark contrast against one of the brighter pictures. Luckily Amazon has a pretty good policy on replacements, although I'm pretty sure they've never heard a reason like mine before. So Jayita has another week or so before she loses another part of my soul to yet another shiny flashy gadget.