Archos Gmini 400
I bought an Archos Gmini 400 about a month or so ago from Newegg.
Before I talk about the product, let me throw in some props for Newegg. They have very good prices, not the rock-bottom lowest , but close. Plus, they list the shipping prices right there on the product pages, so you know what you are going to pay. Also, in my experience, they ship very quickly and I've never waited on a something I ordered longer that I thought I should.
Although I've had flash MP3 players for a long time, I was skeptical about the whole HDD based player thing. Why would I want to have 20GB of music with me all the time? I can just reload my player when I get sick of the stuff I have on there. But, I find that I listen to the thing all of the time because of the variety available to me. This inspired me to digitize all of my music a few weeks ago - I'd been intending to do this someday, but the Gmini inspired me to make it happen. I can't fit my entire collection on the Gmini, but I do have a good chunk. Definitely changes the way I listen to music.
The Gmini is a very nice unit. The music player works as you would expect. It can play WMA and MP3 and the sound is as good as you would expect. I've noticed a few glitches here and there when the hard drive wakes up, but they are few and far between (and some of them could be MP3 artifacts, I'm not sure). When you plug it into your computer via USB, it just works like another disk which is nice because you don't have to have any special drivers and can use it on a number of different computers.
What made me purchase it over an iPod in the same price range ($330) is the video and support for WMA. WMA first. I've got a ton of stuff that has been encoded with WMA over the years. The thought of going back and converting it to another format was not very appealing. If the iPod was head and antlers better than everything else, sure, but it really isn't. It is a nice product, but certainly not that much better than the competition.
Although the color display on the Gmini is tiny, it is surprisingly easy to watch video while you are sitting on a plane. I wouldn't recommend it for cinematographic tour de force kind of movies, but for dialog and character intensive stuff like "Curb Your Enthusiasm", it is fine. The only drawback to the video playback is that you have to jump thorough a few hoops to get the MPEGs into the correct format, but once you figure it out, it isn't difficult to do.