The Sandisk Sansa E270

Rated 8 out of 10 by the editors of CNET and a 7.1 out of 10 by users, the Sandisk Sansa E270 features a built-in FM tuner and recorder, a voice recorder, 6GB of memory and a price tag of roughly $220, which is less than the 4GB iPod Nano.

It is compact flash-based, but does have a slot for a Micro SD card which can expand the capacity by up to 2G. It uses a click-wheel controller system, similar to the iPod. It also supports photos, WMA and MP3 format music, along with videos.

The downside of this more affordable player is that it doesn't ship with an adapter, and sometimes systems noise is audible through its speakers.