Hi everyone,
I'm after recommendations for a new personal music player. I've been looking at reviews on the internet of course but most fail to mention at least one of the features that is important to me so it's a very slow and painful process. I'm hoping that by posting my list of must-have features here you'll be able to tell me whether the PMP you use has them all. Even if it doesn't it would be useful to tell me which features it doesn't have so that I can rule it out. Before I list the features I need to mention sound quality of course. I'm not going to be using it in a critical listening environment or connected to my main hi-fi so it doesn't have to be the highest of high fidelity players. However, it does need to sound reasonably good. My current PMP is a Sony NWZ-A818 and for the environments where I use it, this sounds good enough to me. If it supported gapless playback and was able to charge from USB while playing music at the same time I might not be posting this message. In terms of budget, I'm expecting to spend somewhere between £100 and £150. I know that's at the bottom end of the market for decent PMPs but as mentioned above - I'm not looking for something earth-shattering.

Must-have features
- Reasonable sound quality (see above)
- Charge from USB while playing
- USB for file transfers
- Not require any proprietary software on the PC for transferring files
- Gapless playback
- Line out and headphone out (these can be the same socket if the level can be switched)
- Either a large capacity or an expansion slot

Nice to have features
- Bluetooth
- Non-proprietary connectors (the NWZ-A818 I currently have uses the USB protocol but has a non-standard connector at the PMP end which means that if I ever lose it then replacing it could be tricky and possibly expensive)
- Video playback
- Lossless audio playback

Doesn't need
- A touchscreen interface
- AptX (My other Bluetooth devices don't support this anyway)
- Headphones (I already have some nice ones) but it DOES need a proper headphone socket (see above)

Many thanks in anticipation ...

Simon.