A weekly feature, every Friday, spotlighting digital music products and services. The URL of this feature changes weekly; check the blog on Fridays for new WEEKEND BUYER posts. Previous entries will be linked at the bottom.

iRiver Flash Players

Apple might have hit the sweet spot of memory capacity with the iPod Mini, which holds 4 gigs of music. but there are many inadequacies in the iPod product line generally, including short battery life, lack of an FM tuner, lack of a line in jack, lack of a built-in microphone, lack of WMA file support—lots of lacks! If you're starting to suspect that the iPod is the most overrated product of the last year, you won't get any disagreement here. And for this you've got to wait six weeks for a Mini? Fortunately, alternatives abound, especially if you value compact size over memory capacity.

The iRiver line of flash players (no hard drive, and no moving parts to skip while exercising) ranges from 128k in memory to one gigabyte. They are tiny, easily fitting into a shirt pocket. Yet, many of them contain the very features lacking in the iPod Mini. Check out CNET's summary page of iRiver players, and iRiver's page of flash products. The 700 series is getting good reviews, and the 500 series enables FM radio recording. iRiver's hard-drive models provide excellent values and features, too, but we'll save them for another week.