Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Clip+ is the ideal size for runners or gym rats. Mine replaces a Creative Zen Stone Plus w/Speaker (now obsolete), and if you are familiar with this player, the Clip+ is exactly the same size and thickness. It fits easily into a pants or gym shorts pocket. I will probably cut the clip off, which will make it even thinner. However, I think by now, everyone has owned an mp3 player, and there is a set of basic features that we all expect to have. We expect buttons to work in a standard way. The Clip+ is confusing and/or a failure on many counts. I am still trying to understand the Clip+, but almost without exception I am finding that everything I was used to doing is more difficult or simply impossible. I can't believe this is a "version 2" product. 1. The Clip+ has a date/time setting, but the only place to see it is on the menu where you set it. What was the point? 2. The buttons on the front of the Clip+ depress way too easily. If you bump your pocket just so, you'll pause the player or change tracks. This never, ever happened on my old player - the buttons had enough resistance to prevent this. To avoid this on the Clip+, you use the Lock function which locks out all the buttons. That's better than nothing, but not much. The volume and on/off buttons are on the sides of the case and have more resistance to accidental bumping. 3. The Clip+ assumes that you use MP3 tags to organize your files/albums, so their menu system is based on that. The suppliers of the podcasts I listen to, don't seem to care about tags. And that's fine. I simply rename my files to be in the alphabetical order that I want to listen to them. The Clip+ supports this, but it is not the default mode. You have to wander through the menus to find "Folders" mode. And even so, the menu system seems to jump back into "tagged podcast" mode all the time. 4. The Clip+ lacks a "play one track and stop" mode, which was very handy on my old player when playing podcasts. The player would stop, I'd delete the track and start the next one. This mode doesn't exist on the Clip+. I used to take my old player to bed at night and "play one and stop" was useful there as well. The Clip+ has a sleep mode which is a fair alternative, but it takes about 10 button clicks to get to it. 5. There seems to be a bug where if you delete a file while it's playing, near the end of the file... the Clip+ deletes the NEXT file. You are asked to confirm that you're deleting a file... but you're not told which file is on the chopping block. Nice going there. 6. The display is 3 lines. Most of their menus are 4 lines long. Again, poor design. 7. The Clip+ has a bookmark feature for podcast and audiobook files. If you have played part of a track, a record is kept of your last position in the track. If you leave the track and return later, you return to the bookmarked spot. Sounds like a good idea... but it's buggy. Suppose you're in a track and want to start over. You can't. The "back" button takes you to the start of the _previous_ track. (Hopefully that's a bug they can fix.) From there, the "ahead" button will return you to your (bookmarked) position where you were before. All you can do is manually scan back to the beginning. Sometimes you are given a choice to "Resume" or "Restart" a track... but never when I really want it. If I have to think this much about a "feature" and still can't figure it out, it's the mark of poor design. Stuff like this should just work without having to think about it. 8. In general, the Clip+ requires far too much use of the menu system. On my old player, I could do everything I needed to do with 2 or 3 button presses at the most. I could do a lot of stuff on the treadmill without breaking stride, and without even looking. Not so with the Clip. You really have to be looking at the menus to do anything. 9. The card slot really ought to have a rubber cap or plug. It's just wide open to dirt, lint, moisture, etc. You can see the circuit board through the slot. That can't be a good thing. Well, I hope this helps anyone considering the Clip+.