Full Review

We purchased an E250R for our youngest daughter for Christmas this year. We thought we were buying the same model that our older daughter has had for the past four months. She owns the model E250 (without the Rhapsody Channels) and has had great luck with hers and has not had one single problem. She is 12 years old and although she takes good care of her stuff, I feel this is a testament to the unit's resilience.

Our main issue with the E250R is that you could not completely delete the preloaded songs on the player. When we deleted the songs from the player on our computer, they disappeared from the screen as if they were deleted. But, when you used the player, the songs we had deleted still showed up on the screen with 00:00 minutes of song and the player would lock up at that point. You could not do another thing with the player until you held down the power button for several seconds until it shut itself off and reset- only to repeat the whole process again when it reached another one of the "deleted" songs.

The "Rhapsody Channel" (which is what makes this player different from the plain E250) was cool and came with a ton of various popular songs preloaded on that menu selection. The bad thing is that you don't really have access to those songs on your playlist. They never really explain how the Rhapsody Channel works. Does the music change over time? Will the songs eventually be deleted if you don't subscribe to Rhapsody's Music service? They never tell you. Also, some of the songs of the Hip-Hop genre were inappropriate for young listeners with some descriptions of sexual positions, swear words, etc. and there was no way to remove them from the device.

I believe that the E250R is only available as a special unit from Best Buy. It has the Best Buy logo printed on the lower right front of the box. They also want you download Best Buy's music service onto your computer and they make it almost mandatory. When we did give in and tried to download the Best Buy software it would not load and kept looping us back to the main download screen again and again. We tried at least three times before we gave up. Please note that we are not technically challenged. My husband is a computer programmer and I am certain of his complete ability to install software on a computer properly. We ended up returning the player to Best Buy, which they took back without any issue whatsoever.

The last thing I will say is that it is possible that our problems were due to an interface issue with the new Windows Vista operating system on the computer we were using. But I kind of got the impression from the tech at Best Buy that he had seen this a few times already during the influx of returns they see in the few days following Christmas. We ended up going to Circuit City and buying a regular E250 (no Rhapsody Channel) and it has been working just fine since we brought it home.

I think this is a great player for a fair price. There are a lot of accessories available for it, as well, which I think is a plus. Oh yeah, I failed to mention the video & photo ability, which both work great. My kids think it is cool to download videos made on our digital camera to their MP3 player. My oldest daughter likes the feature that allows her to record from the radio and then play it back later.

Hope this review was helpful to you! :)