hey man you need to take a good look at the specs because 1 1/2 hours is for PCM quality... for speech you can just use hi-lp and get up to 34 hours.
One big problem of mine of these iriver and creative players are the equalizers... I really the bass you can get with sony's. Nor do I like the design of the Iriver players. And the remote really doesnt look nice... i rather keep that in my pocket than hanging it in my clothes. Of course there is also the disc issue, some people want much more than 20gb and i want much less...and here in europe the price of a mz-nh700 is much cheaper than a 20gb player.
You see even though sony is forcing me to use sonicstage, i must say I really like there products (except the whole atrac thing... if the hdd player could play native MP3 and be priced as the same as an Ipod i would consider it, but no native MP3 for HDD is bullshit)