This player will be fine to jog with correct? Thats one reason I never bought a nitrus or karma.

Also where is the best place to pick one up??

Greetings!

It still has a disk drive in it, so it really should be treated with some level of caution. I have not heard any reports of people having trouble with it, but it still has moving parts, similar to the Nitrus and (to a lesser extent) Karma.

As to where, well, I am not really sure at the moment. I think Best Buy was reported to have some.

Not to helpful I will admit...

I went to best buy today to check out the carbon and they had one on display but I didn't get to see the package. The display one was actually working and had music loaded on it.

As for jogging I don't think the carbon would be any better than the nitrus or karma. I would either get it at a store that you can get an extended warranty from or buy a flash player.

On a semi related note.... I wonder how many ipods I could get apple to warranty after killing the hdd by waving it around like a moron like portrayed in the ipod commercials

forgive the dumb question here but I thought the carbon had a 5gb flash/microdrive in it? What parts are moving inside?

Would a muvo 2 or a ipod mini be more suitable for jogging? I'd really rather have Rio product but if it won't hold up for jogging then I guess it'll have to be muvo 2 or ipod.

Will check my local Best Buy.

Microdrives are little hard drives inside a CompactFlash TypeII form factor. They are obviously moving parts....

doesn't the iPod mini also have a micro drive as well, just like the Carbon?

Yep

...and so do all the other 5GB players...

The Rio Forge is what you're looking for (if 1 GB is enough space).

It would seem that (in theory) it should be possible to replace the Carbon's Microdrive CF card with a solid-state flash memory CF card. Unfortunately the 2GB & 4 GB flash cards are now about $280 and $570 respectively. While expensive, this would give you a high capacity flash based player. The Micro-Drives are significantly less expensive than comparable flash memory devices per GB, but have lower I/O speeds (not so important with an mp3 player) and are prone to mechanical failure in higher vibration environments.

-Zeke

Does anybody know the specifics on the "up to 1GB" for storage of the Forge? Does it mean that if I get a 1GB SD card, the total memory recognized is going to be 1GB whether I have the 126MB, 256MB, or 512MB Forge? Is there a chance that a future firmware update could change the max amount of storage (say, if someday 2GB SD cards are available for a reasonable price)?

The total storage is aggregate. A 512 MB Forge with a 1GB cards gives you ~1.5GB. As card sizes increase, I'd expect them to continue working. There's probably some upper limit somewhere, but nothing hard and fast.

Kind of like the empeg... (Sorry, I just could not resist...)