I recently purchased a pair of Sansa e260 MP3 Players from NewEgg.COM (a great resource for electronics by the way) for myself and my brother - who just turned 49 years old. It's a great MP3 player, but what excites me the most is the fact that an Open Source project called Rockbox can be installed on the little ARM9 powered machine and I can then modify it as I see fit! Now this is a real hacker's dream machine. Why purchase a relatively expensive ARM development board when you can get one like this for about $50 bucks and still be able to program for a platform that rivals PCs of the 1980s and 1990s for power and storage?
I'm still in the process of "getting my feet wet" with the source code for the Rockbox, as I have already downloaded, built on my Ubuntu Linux PC, and successfully installed the new kernel on the e260. I hope to work on adding features to the "plugins" collection.
I encourage all hacker types to consider getting such a machine and exploring on it. Don't fear bricking the machine either, for you just can't beat the incredibly low price for replacing it, if necessary.
As an MP3 player, I find its audio to be exceptional, its battery life to be good, and the quality of construction to be great. Buy it ... you'll like it!
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