Pontis Electronic SP-600 Portable MP3 Player

Pros: Robust, inexpensive, good battery life, full featured
Cons: Low LCD Contrast, no apparent US distribution yet.

I had been considering an inexpensive portable MP3 player for some time hoping to get a reasonable quality one in the sub $100 range. Until I discovered the Pontis SP-600, the front-runners in my quest were the 32MB Nike or Rio devices.

I...

Pros: easy expand, good sound, EQ
Cons: navigation, menus, size

I used this player half year ago and was quite satisfied. For a cheap price a can use my digitcam's smaller CF cards and virtually no limit to expand the memory with the dual (MMC+CF) slots.
The sound quality (thanks to the Sennheiser earplugs) is good.
Battery life is acceptable with 2000 mAh rechargeble AA (about 8 hours).
The multifuncional navigation button is a little bit too sensitive and jumps over some steps sometimes, so the navigation in menus a little bit confusing in this way.
Some menu functions are not logical to me and need to much push on the button to reach.
The 5-way programmable EQ is very useful with 5 custom sets, much better then the usual stupid presets.
The Power save Off-time is too short (30 sec).