Toshiba’s Gigabeat MEG50JS is probably the best iPod competitor yet, incorporating as it does a tiny removable 5GB hard disk and USB 2.0 data transfer technology. It is also only 1cm or so larger than the iPod.
The USB 2.0 makes it faster than the iPod in moving music from PC to device and the removable disk means that you can fill and replace hard disks as your music collection grows. Mind you since each 5GB disk can hold over one thousand MP3 songs, you would need to own the world’s largest music collection to go very far down this route.
Price should be somewhere around the $400 mark when it is released later this year. The Japanese site is here.