I got mine in the mail yesterday, it only took 10 days to get it from China (I'm in Utah) which is great. I bought it thru JTShop at
http://www.jiongtang.com/shop/ti-oma...nce-p-178.html for $209, it's now $210 plus $39 shipping. I didn't get the GPS as we already have a TomTom and I assumed there'd be difficulty getting US maps to work.
Mine came with a nice soft-sided case with a mesh pocket on one side and restraining straps for the A81 on the other. It also included some mysterious metal frame with sticky material on two sides, I guess it might be intended as a car mount. It came with AC and DC chargers and an adapter that takes the mini USB to a full-sized USB plug so you can plug any USB device or cable into it. From the above posts it might be that some of this was included free by the vendor.
@imaredr There's a new freeware version of Freda that claims to support epub books but I haven't played with it much.
@all If this is like the Archos at all, the USB host feature will require an externally powered USB device. My 605 will only work that way it hasn't seen much use in months.
@dvalin21 The link to sourceforge and the TCPMP is just the older free version of coreplayer. I haven't played with it yet but it should work well except for newer codecs since it was last updated.
Also, I wish it would recognize my network as that was my plan as well, to use it as a portable player to stream content from my PC. They may fix this in an update or I may just not know how to do this, but it won't see any of my PCs and they are running XP and Vista respectively.
I've had difficulty getting most videos to run on the A81, media player just refuses to recognize many of them and even FLV which is supposedly supported is unrecognized by the players on my A81. For ebooks there are a few good readers but the player might be a bit too heavy to hold for long periods of time. You can use the kickstand of course but this feels a good deal heavier than my Sony reader. Web browsing is too frustrating to do for long and now the keyboard won't come up so I can type in an URL, which is beyond frustrating.
I still have high hopes for this device but for now I don't mind putting it away until it's officially mine on Christmas Day.