"Always obsessed with finding the right tool for the job, I've long run not one, but two MP3 players. The first—currently an 80GB iPod—is responsible for storing my vast MP3 archive of almost 450 albums ripped with the most anal quality settings possible. Being able to carry around this extensive library of tunes is fantastically convenient, making the iPod perfect for toting around town and even better for traveling. I'll even take the iPod skiing, which isn't terribly jarring, and it does just fine at the gym as long as I'm lifting weights and not otherwise bouncing the fragile hard drive around. But if I'm running or navigating one of my bikes down technical singletrack littered with roots, rocks, and other bits of bone-jarring nature, I tend to shy away from anything with a spinning hard drive.

This is where my secondary MP3 player comes in. Here, I'm looking for something small, lightweight, relatively inexpensive, and with flash storage that won't mind being rattled around. Capacity doesn't matter much, since if I'm riding my bike or out running, I only need the loud, energetic, thrashy subset of my MP3 archive that makes me go faster.

For the last while, a Creative Zen Nano has filled in as my flash-based MP3 player, and it's largely been good. However, a couple of years of mud, dust, rain, and sweat finally took its toll on the Nano, leaving me searching for a new flash-based player to abuse during my workouts. Since I've been reasonably happy with my iPod, I thought it would be only fair to consider the latest shuffle. That is until I saw the price. $79 for a 1GB player that doesn't have a screen? Surely you jest.

It didn't take me long to find something better in the form of SanDisk's Sansa Clip. Like the shuffle, it's tiny and has an integrated clip. More importantly, it costs $20 less, yet packs twice the capacity and a gorgeous OLED display. And I'm just getting started. "