Perhaps bizarrely, the best balance between features and cold, hard cash I’ve seen at the moment is actually Apple’s iPods. Which is neat, but I still want an iRiver.

The problem you describe with combining devices is not new though – there’s a large camp of usability technicians who believe that personal devices should serve only one purpose, and serve it well. “To know the task, is to know the device” (paraphrased) is the doctrine. Obviously there’s a tradeoff between usabilty and functionality. I think MP3 players and phones will best be left seperate for the foreseeable future, since they’re disparate tasks.

Incidentally, though, I have an SE phone (the K750i, which is the same as the Walkman one with less “Orange”) and I use it to play MP3s… When I get bored replacing the batteries in my crap little USB-stick player thing.