Of course, the real alternative to the iPod is a cheap Chinese MP3 player labeled “MP4” (a blatant lie you wish the MPEG LA would bother wielding their considerable trademark dicks concerning). They’re cheap, they play music, they’re cheap and they’re cheap. Dreadful interface firmware — I got mine free from a friend who wanted to smash it to bits with a toffee hammer — but you can change that. There’s no gadget someone won’t hack.
I’m generally liking my Cowon D2, which is not cheap, and does not support playlists[*], but the tracks are already in the right order on their respective albums, darn it, and get off my lawn.
[*] Not as a mass storage device. I hear it’ll do them if you talk Microsoft MTP to it.
Brand names are lame, d00d. Generic or nothing. The S1 mp3s not only don’t do playlists, they play tracks in folders in an order I’ve been utterly unable to fathom – not filename or creation time. It’s like a Beowulf cluster of Shuffles! Only sorta crap.