Here's my breakdown.

Nomdad Zen

Looks nice and from an American company, Creative Labs. Its easy to use interface, great sound, slightly smaller than the archos and a bit bigger than the Ipod.

Built in battery but dies after 2 years or so. No problem, according to the Creative Labs website. They'll replace it at no charge when it dies. And yes it has shuffle and such an easy to use playlist, including a LCD screen remote -- how cool! Battery life is pretty good too.

I found the Zen to be a superb overall value.

IPod

A great looking player built by an American company, Apple. The Windows interface is *okay*. The ipod is the smallest, and it has a built in battery, which when it dies, the Ipod is useless. Too expensive for a disposable MP3 player. Decent sound.

Archos Jukebox

A lot of features, looks strange, and a bit heavy from the French Company, Archos. Who needs a 1.5 screen to view multimedia -- a useless feature IMO. To change the volume, you have to go through a series of buttons. Why? Ridiculous. However the Windows interface is the best out of them all; just drag and drop in Windows Explorer. Sound is okay, it sounds flat.

Net MD

This is the Sony MiniDisc player from the Japanese giant, Sony. I tried out the N707 and N1. They're small, great battery life, and they look great. Minidiscs are cheap and they hold 80 minutes of music plus data. Minidiscs are about a dollar a piece, but can only hold 169 MB of data -- its major drawback. You have to use Real Player with the Sony MD plugin to bypass the stupid anti-piracy software Sony included. I own over 750 CDs, and it made it impossible to make discs of my favorite songs if one song was on more than one minidisc. To get around it, I used the RealOne player from RealNetworks. Price, a bit expensive for low capacity. But they are by far the smallest and look the coolest.