Sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, it happens a lot.

It should be noted that spot market prices for the types of NAND Flash used in these players have risen past $16 for 1MB (8Mbit) chips and $31 for 2MB (16Mbit). That's more than double what the prices were at their lowest this spring.

Obviously, the bigger manufacturers have more stable contracts (and probably better prices than this), but it should serve as a good pointer as to what a reasonable price is for these things. Add a couple of $ each for: the screen, chipset, battery, PCB + auxiliary electronics, casing and assembly, etc., and you see how $17-22 (+ dealer profit & shipping) for a 1GB player manufactured May/June is a reasonable floor for as cheap as a Chipod is ever going to get (until Flash prices go down again and capacities increase that is).

When something sounds too cheap to be true, it usually is.

[hr:20bb99321e]
Edit: I'm sorry to hear that you got cheated. To take stab at a positive spin on something negative, they probably support Ogg Vorbis (the aoTuV version sound pretty darn good down to 80kb/s), thus you could still be able to get a reasonable amount of music on to them even @ 128MB. Might not be entirely useless. Oh, and do they have card slots? If so, a Gig of MiniSD or Transflash is available from ~$11-13 at reputable dealers and could put them back in the 'quite usable after all' category.

Yes... this is even true for inexpensive electronic gadgets coming out of China by the tonne!

I bought a Chipod from a reputable seller in the USA after doing some research on and off eBay. The player (2GB) certainly wasn't the cheapest on eBay; in fact, it was one of the more expensive ones listed of its type, but it is a legitimate 2 GB player.

Personally, I wouldn't pay much under $50 US (at today's going rates) for such a player if one wants to be certain they're getting the advertised memory capacity.

well, this was a straight from China deal (they were in China adopting my little sister) and he went to the electronics market and got them, didn't spend much on them at all so it's no big loss and I have 2 mp3 players myself (my SLVR and my old gateway 20 Gig), not to mention my 2 cousins are demonic and despite all their video game playing, they don't know jack about computers.

One positive out of it is that I have 4 sets of headphones (although they are kinda short) and 4 USB to mini USB cords.

I wonder if I could use them like little 128mb flash drives...

buaman22 , these players can also be used as flash drives. The way the player works is quite simply a firmware reading data off a flash drive. But seems pretty bulky to be used as a flash drive alone.

yeah, they're basically trash