MATTHEW FORDAHL should be sacked for that garbage review. Quite frankly, he appears to be an iPod lover told to do a review. Even though he acknowledged the existance of 6 other forthcoming players he was completely unable to make the leap necessary to judge the Nitrus upon it's own merits, and stuck to the "Let's compare it to the iPod" formula instead.
As such, he completely marginalised the physical advantages that the Nitrus has, whilst utterly playing to the capacity vs price crowd;
But Nitrus doesn't recapture the music player crown for Rio. The sleek black gadget is too pricey, its software lackluster and hard drive too skimpy for the price. It simply doesn't offer as much bang for the buck as the iPod, which itself isn't cheap.
At $299, the Nitrus offers 1.5 gigabytes of storage, enough for about 375 songs. The $299 iPod, Apple's low-end model for either Macintosh or Windows computers, has 10 gigabytes of space - enough for 2,500 songs.
I have commented here before that I'm not sure that the Nitrus launch pricing will be seen favorably, and also that it's going to be hard to break the traditional flash=cheap/small/limited vs disk=pricey/big/capacious mindset that has prevailed recently. It's disappointing that AP couldn't find a reviewer capable of doing so.