I bought my Creative Labs Nomad II MP3 player when they first hit the shelves way back in March/2000. I think I paid about $350 for it. Boy was that a good buy.

This think rocks the house. Don't even try to compare it to a Rio or a Yepp or any other MP3 player on the market. I've used them all, I've seen them all...and let me tell you: I have seen my Nomad II dangle in slow motion on the end of my headphone cord and then hurdle down a flight of stairs onto a subway platform and slide about 10 feet...and then I picked it up, put the battery back in, and it kept on rockin.

That is 100% true. It suffered only minor cosmetic damage (a small scratch on the paint - not the glass)...which makes it look more mature and dignified.

If I could date any of the MP3 players out there based on their sexiness...it would be the Nomad II. Voice recorder. FM Stereo. USB. Cradle. Sexy curves. Very sexy curves.

Now, there are some issues...no relationship is perfect. The headphones that came with it died within three months, and the storage is fairly limited. However, both of these problems are easily solved: the first by buying a set of Sony Backphones for $20; the second by using 96kb/s encoded MP3's rather than 128kb/s ones...this makes it possible to fit 25% more songs onto the 64MB Smartmedia card. One other fairly annoying thing is that the random play function isn't random, it's just different. It shuffles the songs once and always plays them in the same order after that.

I also bought a desktop charger for the unit, which comes with a rechargeable Nickel/Mercury-Hydride AA battery. This makes the whole setup perfect. One other thing to note is that I found out from a cool tech working for Creative is that you really don't need to use Creative brand rechargeable NiMH batteries in it.

This is funny. If you try to use another brand battery, the unit won't work. At all. The reason being that the batteries are designed to have a band of conductive metal around the negative terminal. A lead from the unit brushes against the battery to try to detect a voltage potential. If it does, the unit assumes it's a rechargeable battery and acts appropriately. If you want to buy a non-Creative replacement, simply strip a small amount of the label off of the barrel around the negative end of the battery...just make sure that the lead in the unit touches metal and you should be OK.

Overall - you are severely foolish if you choose not to buy one of these.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): $375