all mp3 players

Purchased iRiver for recording. Recorded voice is very good from included lav mic, and excellent when used with higher quality mic. See reviews elsewhere for minor audio issues ("glitch" when writting from buffer to hard drive once a minute (haven't noticed this) and slightly-out-of-sync (but correctable) with video over 1 hour).

vs iPod:
AUDIO QUALITY: I compared by playing same mp3 file on both ipod and h120 at same time and swapped sony-bud phones from one device to the other. Very similiar but I slightly preffered the ipod sound which i found to be a bit more "natural". I believe quality is similiar, just a matter of EQ preferences.
ERGONIMICS: nothing beats the ipod scroll wheel, except maybe the ipod-mini! (but the iriver is not bad at all)
FORM FACTOR: again, advantage ipod.. although a little wider, it's thinner which i prefer.
PC INTERFACE: well, it's preference. I prefer the windows based folder navigation over the "user friendly" itunes, so i prefer the iriver, but i could understand most people preferring the itunes interface. Although the iriver has the advantage of transferring music to/from very easily... adding music from a friend's pc/mac to play on your ipod along with your music may be a challenge, and copying your music from your ipod to another pc/mac may also not be as simple as copy and paste as it is on an iriver.
(there may be DRM issues on both as well.)

Overall, it's a matter of preference - neither is really better or worse than the other, IMHO. Essentially, I prefer the form factor (and the default EQ) of the ipod by a bit, but given the flexibility and features of the iriver including recording, i will likely continue to use the iriver as primary device.

However, one new factor... lossless compressed format supported by ipod in new software & firmware!! This brings the ipod above the iRiver in the crucial sound quality category (although many are happy with mp3).

Hopefully iriver will support a compressed lossless format soon (windows media, flac, shn, whatever...) - they would just need a firmware upgrade.

Good luck in making your decision. Both these devices are lots of fun!

I am going to try and keep this short and to the point. I recently bought a iRiver, and right away i was impressed by the looks, durablility, and how easy it was to use. This is true plug and play.
Its my mp3 player, external hdd, FM Tuner, and voice recorder.
To copy music to the iRiver you dont need **ANY** 3rd party software at all, just drag and drop. Its just as easy to copy and move from MP3 player to MP3 player.
The iPod can only copy files to itself and or delete. So if you are looking for a good place to backup your MP3s dont buy the iPod, cause you can not get them back off of it, but apple does not tell you that upfront, you have to find out the hard way like i did. The iPod also has a battery issue. You have to break the case to open it, there is no way to open it. Thats apples way of making more money from the consumer. I did the apple switch, i switched to iRiver.

I have had my iRiver for about three weeks and I absolutely love it. I have nearly 1000 songs and still have nearly 17GB left. I love that it can read OGG files which are good quality and space saving. From what I know of other mp3 player I have found that this is by far the best because it has an internal and external microphone and a FM radio. The only things I don't like are that once you put a song in it you can't gain space back once it is deleted (kind of obvious but still disappointing) and (this is why you shouldn't buy this product) that iRiver is coming out with the H300 series in America soon (is already released in Japan and Europe) which is nicer looking, a color screen, same space and I think that it will be the same price. The other thing I wish it had was the ability to create a play list anywhere with no host computer but that doesn't bother me much. Overall this product is great and I love it, but once I can get the H320 I will buy that.