Walt Mossberg has a pretty funny line in his review (on his free site) of the new SonicBlue Rio Riot player: But I have seen the iPod, and so the Riot looks and works like a larger, slower, predecessor product, when in fact it has just gone on sale this week, nearly four months after the iPod. He goes on to praise a few of the Riot's features, which at $399 hits the same price point as the iPod: it has a 20 Gb drive (like a similarly price Nomad Jukebox), works on Macs and Windows, and has a big screen which is uses.
But Mossberg prefers the iPod. It still tinier. It uses the fast FireWire interface. It synchronizes with a PC-based list of tunes. And it's simpler to use.