well the i2 does everything the vision:m does and more. better codec support, dts/dd outputs, s-video out (i dont
think the zen has that), 14 hour battery life when watching videos......the zen and the ipods cant touch that - they cant even manage half that. The flip side is mp3 playback - its hardly much better at 16-18 hours, mainly i believe because the software doesnt shut the hard drive down when playing mp3's. The battery life would be much better if it did, i'm sure. The screen is good. Not brilliant and very poor in direct light, but ive yet to see a dap that isnt. touch screen is a nice touch (pardon the pun) but its a double edged sword - great when your sitting still but you try moving scroll bars withthe stylus when your sitting on a coach or a bus. Funny but it can be quite frustrating when your bobbing around in a coach lol.
it does have major drawbacks though. the biggest being no support for it - mean very little hope of fixing the few niggles it has, like perculiar audio-decoding problems which manifest as quiet distortion, and the audiable interferance from the hard drive when listening to very quiet audio with the volume up high. That's not a problem for music - 25 (out of 40) on the player is the equivalent of 33-35 on my iriver h10 (pretty loud) at it'll happily pum away at my ex90's at 30-33 on the volume. It's films it really effects, so if your encoding for the player, its best to encode a film with its 2 channel soundtrack, or at least use normalization on the 5.1 track otherwise you end up listening at full whack just to hear the converstion on the screen. Lets see what else.....slower than id like picture viewing, rubbish radio performance, and SRS WOW doing precisely jack other than distorting most audio material. Oh and slight sync issues with certain video codecs.
Other than that, its great and i prefer it over a vision:m but remember its a lot bigger, and with the extended battery, a lot heavier. I like mine though, it doubles as a handy storage device for transferring pics from my camera to with the supplied cable. 30gb memory card anybody?
