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I am VERY happy with the product. PERFECT for LINUX. I have found this device amazingly good for the price, for sound, audio, pics, text and more. I am using with Linux (Ubuntu) and it is totally compatible with and usable in Linux. I also used this product and its SW in Windows, but like most things, it is faster in Linux. Even conversion of videos to SMV format is easy with the enclosed SW for Windows, OR the superior smv_encode for Linux which is available online. Might not be as perfect as an iPod (which I have as well) but tremendous for the size and price (1/3 an iPod's).

I bought this product a week ago and am returning it asap, and I rarely return things, as I can usually find a way to work around things. I am a previous owner of an iPod Nano, and that may be coloring my criticisms, so take this as some disclosure.

First, I found that random shuffle isn't really random. On the iPod I had, when I requested a random shuffle, it would actually shuffle the music and I could not detect any patterns in music sequence between any two shuffles. Not so with GoGear. Over the course of a week, I could detect patterns such that when song A was playing, I knew what the next 10 songs would be, and that was irritating. Not only did the same patterns repeat, they repeated on a small subset of songs -- there were tons of songs that were never played when in random mode!

Second, I thought that I could circumvent that by making playlists. The users guide and online FAQ said I could do this through Windows Media Player. That may be true of some of the other models that this User's Guide is used with, but not of this particular model. I confirmed this with a call to customer service, and they said that playlists could not be made on WMP on this particular device -- only one playlist could be made, and that could only be made by pressing the 'playlist' button on the player when a song I liked was being played. That to me is a horrible partial solution.

So, these two things are dealbreakers for me, so I am returning the product.