buy it OR dont buy it

Unless you have an old computer (running Windows ME or earlier), there's not much of a contest. The SSF-8001 - that's not really a good product name, is it? - is smaller, but that's about all it has going for it. Radio in portable music players is seriously overrated. After all, if you have enough music of your own, why let someone else control what you hear?

The iPod mini has much more storage (4 or 6 GB), a great interface, and transfers music much, much faster because it supports USB 2.0 (note: if your computer's old enough, you might not have USB 2.0 ports, but you can get an add-in card to fix that). You might actually get frustrated with that SSF-8001 because songs will take much longer to copy from the computer to the player.

So again, get the iPod mini. :) Just remember to go shopping for a nice case to hold it in, and look at the guides on Apple's website (and on iPodlounge!) if you need help.

i never heard of the SSF-8001. if i were you, i'd get something well known that you know works...in this case, that's the ipod mini. and as vbhtml said, if you are looking at a flash player with between 256MB-1GB of storage, then you shouldn't compare this SSF thing to the mini. Compare it to the shuffle. The shuffle is a great product as well as the mini so...but definately go with something well known. i still recommend an iPod, but everyone has a preference.