Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had one of these for over two years then I lost it while in the woods. All of the features matched my needs. The ability to store music, podcast, and make my own voice recordings made it a one-device does all for me. You can set date/time on recordings (music or voice recording) to play as an alarm so I wake up to a different song each day of the week. The sound quality is excellent and when you use Sony's Sound Organizer you can easily set-up podcast downloads, move music and recordings to/from your PC. Anyway, I lost one of these and I looked for it for a month or two and I just couldn't stand being without it so I bought this replacement. I didn't rate it at 5 stars because the display isn't back-lit. Everything is great on this device except you can't see the screen in low light without you flashlight or something. Some folks say the menus are complicated but I disagree. The right-left button scrolls through the top level menu and then there is a choice for "Details" to take you to a second level. A different list of menu items may appear if you are in playback or record mode. It wasn't long for me to get familiar with how it works. Oh and the batteries...I have left it running all night in the woods to "listen" for game sounds. I retrieve it and review the recording in Sound Organizer for peaks in the sound graph. I can do this three nights on one pair of batteries. It's very efficient with energy consumption. It can go 16-20 hours easy on a battery and records. Another cool thing about this device is it has an external speaker so you can chose to use ear phones or just playback through the speaker. It also has a mic-in jack so you can add one of those ear piece microphones and record meetings or conference calls for later use to take notes. All in all, I have been very pleased with this device and my 15 year-old son has bought one and is using it to keep all of his music on now...and he has iPhone and other devices but he likes this thing better.