Ziz said:
The "next generation" of media player is already here - flash memory cards. It's a matter of waiting for cost vs. capacity to come down. That's the ideal "player" when you think about it - no moving parts to break down.

Yeah, but the cost for the amount of storage is insane. A "media player" of any size is going to need a terabyte or more of disc space. Flash memory cards aren't anywhere near that size yet and they won't be for the foreseeable future.

I'm not very concerned with moving parts. The only "moving parts" in my media player are the fans (easily replaceable) and hard drives. Standard hard drives have much better reliability than flash cards. Flash cards have a problem with doing to many writes. They can easily lose capacity and fail quickly if the writes aren't done at random places. Cameras, PDAs, and mp3 players do this just fine, but PCs tend to write linearly. That's bad for flash drives.

If a 1 TB drive fails, I have a 5 year warranty on the drive. I simply send it in for replacement. Sure, you'd have to backup all the data on the drive to another drive so you don't have to completely rebuild the system, but that's far cheaper than anything else. I just don't see flash memory ever being able to compete on a price/storage ratio. We'll be waiting a long time for the price to come down and something better will likely come along before then.