grommal

There is quite a bit of discussion about the Meizu in the Portable Audio forum of head-fi.org. I have not heard one personally, but most folks consider it a very good deal for the money, especially with the positive features you already mentioned. The two negatives that get brought up a lot are a current firmware bug and hiss with certain earphones. The firmware bug can cause skipping near the end of tracks for certain file formats and bit rates (I don't remember which ones). The hiss issue is apparently pretty severe, but only if you have high sensitivity earphones like some of the Shures and a few others. I almost bought one, but picked up one of the new Sony NWZ-S616 instead (the 6xx series is the close cousin of the 8xx series, though I don't know if it's available in Singapore).

I have the NWZ-S616 in RED. That color and texture (not quite mirror smooth) makes fingerprints absolutely invisible. The only place they can be seen is on the screen itself. I really love the player. Sounds great through my Atrio M5's. Simple to operate. The 6xx series is definitely the underdog, but for folks like me who already own better in-ear monitors than any earbud Sony has, it's a much better deal than the 8xx series. My only real gripe so far is the firmware bug that causes the year info to be lost if files are transferred to the player by drag and drop in Windows. This does not happen if a media player application is used to sync the Sony, but I'd prefer to use plain old drag and drop. Hope there's a firmware fix for this somewhere along the line.

I have the NWZ-S616, and have observed the same issue. I assume you are loading the files onto the player by drag and drop in Windows. When you do this, the date info is not carried along (this can be verified by examining the files once they are on the player). If you load the files using Windows Media Player or Media Monkey (or other media players, I presume), the year info will show up. This is a firmware bug, as far as I'm concerned.