I have the riot. I got it over the ipod because of the hdd size at the time now they have 20 gig hdd ipods and because of the clueless sales people at the apple store in the mall of america.

The only thing I don't like about the riot is you have to use real one or real jukebox to load the music onto it. I would rather have something like emplode that isn't an all inclusive music manager / player I just want something to put the songs on the player with. The size has not been an issue it still fits in my pockets fine. The transfer speed isn't really a big issue to me after I do the big initial loading I only upload an album at a time when I get a new one.

The riot is 200.00 less than the ipod with the same size hdd so if I had to buy one today I would still go with the riot just for that reason.