It's always nice when a story ends well, especially when it appears it's not. Per some previous posts, I've been struggling more than a bit to come up with a portable music solution that works, and as a result have spent some quality time with three companies: Sonos, iRiver, Rhapsody. The problem was with syncing the iRiver clix with Rhapsody. It was slow, it skipped, it lost connection. First up -- Sonos (only implicated because I get Rhapsody via them at home). They were great -- responded super quickly to email, had useful suggestions, quickly determined not an issue with their service or hardware. Rhapsody: a bit mixed, but pretty good overall -- good IM chat help, reachable via 800 numbers at good hours, worked super hard to resolve the problem. The bad -- clearly had a script, wanted me to reboot, install, reinstall, format, clean cookies, clear cache, etc. and so on, even when I knew these were not the issues. Finally, iRiver. Wow, bowser to them. So, it had become pretty clear to me I had a hardware issue. No online chat, no response to email, no 800 number, bad hours, long wait time on the phones. Flash the device, again. Review issues, again. Finally, agreed that it sounded like hardware issue, send the device back and IN SIX WEEKS THEY WOULD EITHER REPAIR OR SEND A REFURBISHED UNIT. Ya got to be kidding was my response. Six weeks? Even Apple will replace the iPhone battery faster than that. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth (on my part) I told them to pound sand, that even tho they had a super cool device I was now done with them and was just going to return it and they'd end up refunding my money. But alas, since they had screwed with me for so long, I was now outside the window of Amazon return.
So who wins the customer service award? Amazon. I sent their support team an email, an hour later they responded saying sorry I'd had a bad experience, they shipped a replacement device to me that day, which I arrived today (ONE DAY), directions on how to return the bad device and I now have a functioning iRiver Clix and a much stronger disposition to buy from amazon, and a cold feeling in my heart for iRiver, even tho they have a cool device.