Everytime Brian tells me something that involves his portable media center, I think about getting one. He has the Samsung model, which I really like the look/feel of and it seems to work well (although the length of transcoding is a reoccuring complaint), but my only real plan for getting one was to sign up with pvps4free.com (only 3 away from completion!), which has the Creative portable media center, but not the Samsung one.

What that site does have though, is an option where you can choose money (PayPal, but that is basically real money… you can even have it transferred into a chequing account) instead of an actual product, which means that one could, if one so desired, pick the money option and then go and buy the Samsung device.

The problem is, that scenario is a very different action in terms of family budgeting. I mean, saying to my wife… “I signed up on this site and I ended up with a $400 gadget” is one thing… saying, “I had $450 in my hand and I could have used it for anything… and I bought this gadget…” is quite a different situation. Hmm…. maybe the Creative one isn’t as big as it seems?