I took the Clip for a spin this weekend and was largely impressed. I loaded up a bunch of music from my Rhapsody subscription account, and while the syncing process took a while, I imagine that had more to do with Rhapsody than the Clip. The monochrome LCD screen is extremely small, but it does the trick, even if you can't read more than one line at time.

The same goes for the controls—not great, but it's hard to complain too much about such a low-priced player. The scroll wheel is more an aesthetic choice. The wheel actually works more like a cross pad: You have to press up, down, left, or right rather than scrolling through choices. To the left of the wheel is a devoted Home button that brings you back to the main menu. A switch on one side lets you turn the device on and off and put it on hold. On the other side is the headphone jack and volume controls.

The Clip can get loud—in fact, the device offers pretty good sound for a device in its class, which makes the included headphones even more of a bummer. They're bulky and offer up a fairly tinny sound—but once again, it's hard to complain given that players going for three times as much still don't offer much more in the way of included headphones.

The biggest downside of the 4GB is, perhaps not surprisingly, a sacrifice made in the name of aesthetics. At night and even under in indoor lighting, the bright blue of the screen's text is quite visible—a nice complement to the device's silver finish. Taken outside in daylight, however—even on an extremely overcast day—the display completely disappears. In fact, the first time I took it out, I was convinced that the battery, purported to last a good 15 hours, had died. The issue was actually the reflective finish, which rendered the screen totally unreadable.

The mere fact that this thing has a screen puts it above several other players in its class (including the most prominent one). However, the device's menu system wasn't designed to be navigated through blindly, and therefore proves a bit more tricky than the one on the shuffle.

Otherwise it's pretty easy to recommend this low-end player for those looking for something small and cheap—or perhaps a rugged and lightweight second player for trips to the gym. Just don't expect to do a lot of DJing out on the sidewalk.