My sister wants an iPod Nano or equivalent for her birthday..my budget is ~$100. Recommend stuff!

Refurbished Zune/Nano?

SanDisk's Sansa players are really nice. Does she use iTunes?

8Gb Zune and 8Gb Nano are about $4 different...is there much of a difference quality-wise?

Zune+Zune Pass. Nothing compares.

Buy a Sansa from Woot :p

Scandisk

It's an iPod
+You can listen to the radio on it.
+You can record voice memos.
-Games

Just get her a refurbished ipod nano so she doesn't feel like a loser every time she pulls out her mp3 player.

Ebay.

BAD idea (if you're retarded like I was)

There's a sony MP3 player that one of my friends got that was only 50 dollars and it was pretty decent. It had a color LCD, touch sensitive buttons, and picture and movie capabilities. It was also 4 gb and the size of a nano. Good deal, I say.

Looks like this:

sansa fuze.... does it's job well and it's sound quality gets plenty of praise

though i suggest replacing the stock earbuds with something better no matter which one you get for her Sennheiser MX560 is a good option

I have a Sandiska Sansa, it's great. Though now i use a Zune

I have an 8GB Philips MP3 player that I got for around $100.

I concur

Sansa or Zune.

i'll trade my nano for your police car

.

Are the other products any better, or is the iPod Nano a solid product?

There are pros and cons to everything. I think your sister's technology literacy comes into play here. If she's a techie and uses Winamp or something, get her something else. If she doesn't know the first thing about getting music, get her a player that has some sort of store, like an iPod or Zune.

She doesn't have her own computer...she has access to a few laptops (her school-issued one..mac, and other PCs). She's definitely a techie, though.

Would she know how to manually put the music files onto the player without syncing software? Would she know how to rip CDs, buy music and download it manually, or otherwise obtain music?

creative zen. i love this mp3 player. and it'll plug into anything running xp sp2 or higher and just work. i have 2 of them. one for books and one for music and podcasts.

Yeah, she'd figure it out easily enough.

seriously, look at the zen even if you don't get one. i know a coupel of others have been mentioned here but it bugs me that most people (including the pundits on podcasts) only ever mention, thereby making it seem like there are only 2 options, zune or ipod.

Now that I've discovered ZunePass, I want a Zune..heh..maybe when XM/Sirius goes bankrupt, I'll use that instead.

I'll take a look at the Zen- thanks!

Got my sister an 2007 80 gig ipod for christmas for $150 in mint condition. Don't know what your talking about.

My Creative Zen Vision:M works great. I've never had any issues with it. I use it for pretty much 5-6 hours a day at work and on the train there and back. I've had it a year and a half, it still works as well as it did when I got it.

Can't speak for newer creative players but I had a Jukebox 3 previously,
which still works great, I only got rid of it because it was too big to carry around, my mother has a 5 year old Zen Touch which she uses every day for about 30 mins and has had no issues.


I wouldn't get a Sony. My sister has a NW-HD1, I have no issues with the player itself but it is impossible to get the tracks off the MP3 player once they've been put on due to them being DRM encoded as soon as they're put on which means you can't sync your library back across to the PC (or to a new PC as my sister wanted to do) also the software (SonicStage) isn't very nice to use.

The iPod Nano is fairly solid because its in its 4G. I think the Zune is in its 2G, but its already a damn good device.

its more of a hit and miss thing
so you got lucky i guess

I have an iPod Nano, but I got it as a gift. The "wheel" control has become somewhat finicky. I think I got the earlier version of it.

Maybe I'll pull up Amazon and let her pick what she wants..heh..

I think sansa is the best bet. Radio ftw.

I am totally expecting a wootoff this wk so grab her a Sansa from there!

I would, but I'm going over there Wednesday afternoon (for a couple of days) and they don't have internet (well, sometimes they can leech from the neighbors.. :ninja:).

I got a Zen V for christmas a few years back.

It plays music and I don't have to install a tonne of retarded crap just to shove stuff on it.

And when I forget my memory stick I can use it for that too.

Only non-iPod I've used with regularity is my 8 GB N95 and it works great for that. If you could find one cheap it'd be way better than any MP3 player because it has a staggering amount of functions.