Guys thanks to all of you very much for your advice! last w.e. I finaly bought a NH700. I'm quite happy now :-) yes, it is abit bulky...I hadn't seen a real one before and in the pictures available on the net they all look much slimmer!! no pic actually shows the battery vane! Anyway, no big deal for me!! the battery took forever to charge...dunno why... I find particularly unpleasant that it denys some functions (such as recording) saying that there isn't enough battery....but it's still got plenty of battery for playing and doing other things!! This means that I have to spend a life time do discharge the battery before I start charging it again! a part from this the first recording experiment was really exciting!!! fantastic quality!!!( I'm using a sony mic ECM 907). I now have some serious big bad recording with very little fiddlig at all! The uploading also worked ok! The sonicstage is really bad! (lets not swear!) It's very good if you want to buy music from the sony website but its shit for all the rest! First, not user friendly at all!!! second I would like to upload and convert into a different format (MP3 or wav)...but it seems like it doesn't do it! Do I necessarily have to burn a f... CD?!!!! I had to install another software called "wav conversion".... And to convert in MP3 I used "HIMDrender"... is there any easy way around this?!! To complete the bad points, sonicstage is taking forever to convert my MP3 before it puts them into the MD... All I'm doing is transferig a CD full of MP3s into the MD...but is seems to take forever! Any way around this?! Finally...it refused to convert and transfer one of the files because of proprietary rights................this really gets me furious!!!!!!! To conclude the HIMD is a really nice little toy I'm really satisfied... but the software is a pain....any suggestion to get around it?! thanks otto PS: I believe I'm using the last verion of sonicstage 2.3....