Hey you guys, just talkin' around on the IRC and figured this would make a cool thread too.
What is your favorite portable media player? I have both an 80gig ipod and an 80gig zune, I'm torn between the two, for a few reasons;
my ipod has all my drm encoded music i bought from itunes
my ipod can be synced with itunes, which in comparison with the zune software, is a god send.
my zune can listen to the radio, browse the market place, play games built with the xna microsoft thingy, has a bigger screen (Same resolution though?) and all my videos are automatically converted to be played on it from the zune software.
now I know what you're thinking, that's a huge list for zune, and a small list for ipod, but I really like my purchased music from itunes and seriously, the zune software sucks.
Anyway, what do you use, what do you recommend, what do you dislike?

I'm still hunting around for a player that has decent playback and controls, supports Ogg-Vorbis & FLAC (without mods if possible) and is larger than the tiny 4 Gig versions available around the place.
Personally, I don't like how the iPod works, and most others I've come across use flick/slide gimmicks that I'm too likely to break within the first month of use.

Well to be honest I've only owned 3 mp3 players in my time. THe first was cheap, crappy and had 128 mb of storage.
The second was from the first generation of iPods to come with a dock. I loved the thing (and I loved showing it off) it did everything I needed it too, though I used my own headphones as apples ones are crap.
The third was the black iPod video I got alittle over a year later as my first up and died on me. I still have it. I love the little thing though not without noticing it's flaws. One of the problems with iPods has always been the battery life, I don't know what it's like on the newer models but it wasn't spectacular when this one was new and has since fallen to dismally low levels. It really doesn't help that apple charge a small fortune for replacement batteries and I -think- you lose everything you currently have stored on it. Also the headphones you get with it probably still suck.
The amount of accessories you can get for iPods is also huge. I have a BOSE sound dock for mine which is where it spends most of it's days now and it's great. Most modern cars have some sort of optional bit of kit that'll let you hook your iPod upto a car stereo.
There might be better players out there but the fact that the iPod is the most popular and you can therefore get all sorts of useful things for it quite easily means I'd still suggest it.

I have a 4gig iriver L-Player [url=]http://www.iriver.com.au/iriver/index.cfm?pageID=2&sID=1&prodID=25&mid=45&[/url] - small, easy to use, sounds great and it only cost me around $100 Australian. Plays ogg and flac as well Ois, but only comes in 8gig max.
I bought a pair of Koss KSC-75 headphones to go with it, and it sounds superb :)

I have a U2 iPod Video. Got it 2-3 years ago, really hard to find now.

I have one of those Ipod videos from the 5th generation. I got it for Christmas and have been very happy with it. I have always wanted to like and have a Zune though, but already having one working player it doesn't make sense to get another one.

I've occasionally been tempted to get a linux eeepc and just keep it in a backpack for portable media usage, you've got to admit that even the swankiest mp3 player screen would pale in comparison.
I'm currently using a HTC Touch Cruise PDA/Phone as my portable media & gaming device, the 8GB Micro SDHC card I bought for it only set me back $40 so that was a good deal. Got most of the music I'm likely to listen to, good mix of classical, metal, rock, funk & pop and still has plenty of room for the entire ScummVM catalogue (at least the good games)

I prefer my iPhone 3G over all other media players.
-Purchase and download from a selection of 8 million, soon to be 10 million, DRM-free songs from damn near anywhere (Wi-Fi, 3G, or Edge)
-Little things like cover flow and Genius that make it an even more awesome music listening experience.
-16 GBs is enough space for my library and then some.
-The screen is excellent for watching movies, tv shows, podcasts, and youtube videos on.
-It also makes calls!
The only thing its lacking is an FM/AM radio, but I always have Pandora for that.

My music collection is on the small side, so a little $30 2 gig Samsung YP-U3 with OGG support and good sound quality does the job. I tend to prefer creating my own music files from purchased CD's with my preferred tools, so it suits me just fine.
iPods are obviously the popular choice, but really, given their price bracket they're a tad limited in the feature department (codec support, standard connectivity options, even sound quality for some models), if not the famous Apple-tastic style.

I have a "little" Creative 60 gb player, ufortunatly, its getting so old now, that it are getting problems playing music whitout freezing for a few seconds now and then.. (and it only have a black and white screen) well, soon time for upgrade, as long as i find a 60gv+ Creative player, since they are rather solid it seems.

On the one hand there's my Palm Centro, fot when I'm on the bus or waiting for a friend to arrive. 8GB may not sound like much, but with CorePlayer's excellent .h264 support and ClieVideo's overclocking tools, you can fit a couple of seasons of Boston Legal on it.
When I'm going on a longer trip, it's the PSP, running on similarly encoded files. If there's Internet, I access my home library. The screen isn't perfect (3000 series) and tends to produce scanlines, but it's very bright and works reasonably well on the outside too.

I am doing fine with my 2 GB Nokia 6300 cell phone. :P

I've got my GP2X. It does pretty much anything I want it to. It plays all my mp3s and videos, I've got ScummVM on it, a C64 emulator, an Amiga emulator, a GBA emulator and various other games.
I'd like a Pandora, but wasn't aware of it before the 4000 preorders were gone.

For people liking the GP2X, there's still the Tapwave Zodiac around (more or less, you can find dozens of them on eBay). Technically, it's very different: No Linux, instead it's based on PalmOS, bundled with a large amount of heap memory and an ATI 2d video accelerator, but it seems to attract the same clientele. With two SD slots and MPEG-4 ASP (DivX/Xvid) acceleration, it's great for video and music. If you want a PDA combined with a media player and nice support for old games (there are a lot of emulators, specifically written for the Zodiac), then this thing is still worth a look.
Biggest drawbacks:
Only 200Mhz CPU (and can't be overclocked much higher)
Only Bluetooth, needs a Wifi SDIO card.