Looking for an iPod alternative? If you haven't found what you're looking for in an iPod, check out the 2G iRiver Clix, which won the highest rating for a portable digital music player from CNET editors.
The 2nd Gen is much thiner than its predecessor, and produces amazing sound, according to the editors--but you have to purchase different headphones than the player comes with to take advantage of this. They recommend the Shure SE310 Sound Isolating Earphones.
We're perplexed, however, and hoping someone can shed some light on why the 8GB version doesn't seem to be available anywhere?
I have a 4GB Clix2 and I love it. The sound, particularly the SRS WOW HD effects, is amazing. The thing that really sets it apart for me though is the customizable Flash-based interface. Just drop a font from your computer into the device's fonts folder and/or a custom Flash Lite swf and you can totally change the look and feel of the player using custom graphics, animations and fonts. The screen is to die for and it even has a Czech language setting!
The down side is that the music app that comes with the Clix from iRiver sucks. Balls. I use WMP 11 to sync the player and it's surprisingly good. It still doesn give you any good way to put videos on the device, though. I use a freeware Java app called iriverter to compress movies and TV shows. A 30 min video ended up being 115 MB. All in all I prefer iTunes, but WMP works fine.
Overall it's better than the nano, with the exception of the above and a few very odd UI choices. For example the only way to get to the screen where you choose the EQ is to hold the play/pause button. Going to Settings -> Audio only allows you to edit the EQ settings, not choose them.
The reason you can't find the 8 GB model anywhere is that it hasn't officially been released in the US. It was scheduled for June, but got delayed. This is exactly why I picked up the 4 GB version...
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