Were there? Such as what? I had a Diamond Rio mp3 player that held 64mb of songs, 2 albums at crap quality, AA batteries, a parallel port interface and fiddly UI. Then the iPod came long with 5GB, firewire, rechargeable battery and the scroll wheel control, it was streets ahead of anything else I saw before 2001.
I will tell you what was better, my Sony Minidisc player it would and still will knock spots off the other crap for shear quality ,granted there were many problems which Sony should have sorted, but still the best by a mile.
