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I used to have an old skool walkman, it was kind of crappy though. Then I went to a Memorex CD player with 20 second anti-skip protection, haha. It was actually a pretty good skip protection, too. From there I went and got conned into buying a stupid Sony CD Walkman/atrac3 player instead of getting the iPod I had wanted. I lived with that for as long as I could bare it before finally getting my precious 20 GB iPod. It lasted for a long time too, and once it died I went and got myself a 5.5 G iPod, which I'm still using.
 
I had a few sony CD Players and a creative zen micro (I actually liked that alot)

I would have kept the creative player but I <3 Itunes and it didnt have enough memory
 
It was alright and played good but I had to get the headphones replaced by Dell only for them to mess up too (the rubber around the plug would crack). Then in the spring of 2006 I was running on the treadmill only to have the hard drive in it crash, so I bought an iPod. Lesson learned: never buy anything Dell.

So because you did something that you are not recommended to with an HD player you are blaming the company for how bad of a product it is.

I had a fantastic Sony HD5 mp3. It sounded very beautiful and the battery life was awesome. I was getting something like 40 hours of audio. The real nice thing it has was a removable battery. SonicStage was soo bad I wanted to blow my head out. Then I moved to a 60gb iPod video because the device failed after 3 years of use. A step down in many ways, specially battery and audio quality, not to mention itunes is not the best. I mean it is better than Sonic Stage but nothing close to finder and explorer. Then again the color screen is pretty boss(not as vibrant as others but hey) and its roomy.
 
Sony NT-1 Scoopman player (very unique digital tape player. Tape is the size of a postage stamp and could hold one hour per side of digital music of DAT quality.)

Looks like that unit did 32 kHz/12 bit. That WAS one of the DAT formats available, but by far the worst, and way worse than CD quality. I doubt many people used DAT with that setting.
 
I listed to MP3's on a Toshiba E750 Pocket PC. (which had replaced a Palm M515 handheld). For workouts, I also listened to music on an old Sony MP3 player that was in the shape of a pen ( the model number escapes me now). Using Sony's clunky software and store at the time was really testing to one's patience.

This was before my purchase of a first Gen iPod mini. My iPhone now makes everything above seem like antiques.
 
First I had portable tape players, then I had portable CD players, ending with a nice RCA MP3 CD player in 2002. I got my first iPod, a 10GB 3G in 2003.
 
Wait you are telling me the HD crashed because it was a Dell? First of all Dell is using a Toshiba HD, possible the same model as the ones in the same year ipod. Then again it is not recommended to run with an actual HD so yeah.

The hard drive in the DJ was actually made by Hitachi (had a little sticker on the box), but the fact the hard drive failed surprised me because I wasn't holding it and it wasn't on my body but instead in the cup holder on the treadmill, with minimal vibration. The fact that it is a Dell isn't why I haven't purchased anything else Dell, just the fact that the overall workmanship was poor and I had a less than pleasurable experience with Dell Financing.
 
The hard drive in the DJ was actually made by Hitachi (had a little sticker on the box), but the fact the hard drive failed surprised me because I wasn't holding it and it wasn't on my body but instead in the cup holder on the treadmill, with minimal vibration. The fact that it is a Dell isn't why I haven't purchased anything else Dell, just the fact that the overall workmanship was poor and I had a less than pleasurable experience with Dell Financing.

I guess that my mistaken since most of the mp3 i have seen are running Toshiba HD(unless their microdrive players then segate or hatachi). I guess that is an odd one why the hd failed if you were doing nothing to physical with it. What funny/odd is a used Dell DJ can fetch you more money than an ipod of the same year or so.

I first was using a Toshiba Genio e550 pda for my video and audio with a 128mb CF card(this was back in like 2002).
Then I moved to an HP ipaq H-series, then to an HP iPaq RX3710 with a 1gb sd card. It was a fantastic media player and universal remote.
Then to a Cowon A2 which I still have and still use. Not the best looking device, but the feature set is pretty unmatched.
Finally an iPod Mini, because it was the only play I could use a 16gb cf card and rockbock that didn't originally use an HD.
 
Portable cassette player
Portable CD Player
128 meg D-link mp3 player
HP Compaq IPAQ 5555 PDA
40 gig ipod 4th gen
8 gig Iphone
160 gig Ipod Classic
 
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