Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Disclaimer: I got this as a gift. Had I been able to choose my own player, I likely would not have chosen (and still would not choose) this item. Let me start with the good stuff: 1) Excellent sound quality! Nice comprehensive (and customizable) EQ, too :). 2) Very small, comfortable to hold in my hand, fits easily in the pockets of even my tight jeans. 3) Plays protected WMAs. HUGE plus! Wouldn't accept any player that didn't support this (:ahem: iPod). For just $15 a month, I have hundreds of thousands of songs at my fingertips... it's a fabulously liberating opportunity that you can't comprehend until you actually experience it. 4) It's neat to be able to listen to NPR (radio), and the extensive preset slots are handy. Now for the icky stuff: 1) I find that the side controls are impossible to operate by touch. So when the H10 is in my pocket, I can't feel where forward and back are. That's bad design, IMHO. 2) I had to format it before I could use it with Napster. 3) The aforementioned inability to natively play songs in album order. This is a horrendous bug, particularly when playing albums whose songs blend into each other (musicals, thematic albums, etc.) 4) I don't like the earbuds; while they offer great sound, they keep falling out of my ears (though this could be simply a personal-preference/personal-problem kind of thing). 5) What use is the photo feature?! It doesn't automatically show album art. It does a dastardly bad job of compressing full-size jpegs (jaggy-city!). And the screen is smaller than the display on my actual camera. When would anyone actually use this darn feature? 6) Sync'ing playlists is problematic with WMP10. When I delete a song from a playlist, for instance, WMP10 says "Deleting [songname] from iRiver H10" but it doesn't actually delete it. So, synchronizing should be renamed "copying"... which stinks. I need the ability to actually keep my playlists in SYNC. Only workaround I've discovered: Delete the playlists off of the H10 and simply recopy over the newer version. 7) There's no two-way metadata sharing. For instance, I can rate a song 3 stars on the iRiver, but that rating isn't carried back to WMP when I sync. For that matter, is there even ONE-WAY metadata sharing? I haven't noticed the H10 doing anything with the ratings I have made on WMP. Blah :( 8) It sometimes takes too long to shut down (more than 5 seconds). 9) This is more of a Napster negative than H10 negative, but still... so many songs are purchaseable but not transferable. That's really rude and unfortunate, IMHO. Add to this the legendarily awful support of iRiver, and I must say, I'd not encourage anyone to actually pay money for this item. Maybe with a firmware update things'll be better, but I've been burned so often in the past waiting for promised firmware updates, only to have the company simply release a new product version a year later and offer a wonderful "$20 coupon" and insist that we shell out $229 for a new player. Great.