hard drive players are crippled by battery life (Score 2, Interesting)

Both the iPod and Rio Riot use Li-Ion batteries and have a life of about 10hours. As I see it this gives them very little advantage over MP3 CD players. A CD will hold more than ten hours of MP3's. A good MP3 CD-Player will run for 15hours on a pair of AA's, and you can easily carry more with you. I travel around a lot and that feature is very important to me. Until they produce one that runs on fuel cells (which can't be that far off) I don't see myself wanting a hard drive based music player. A CD based player may be larger but its lighter, less fragile and a hell of a lot cheaper. With the money you save you could even buy a solid state player to take running. The hard drive players may work while you're running but I bet it makes them fail a lot sooner than they would otherwise. One thing I have to say in Rio's favour is that their firmware support for the Rio Volt has been superb. I would not be surprised to see ogg and/or mp3pro support there soon.