I would go with an I-river. One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that it would be easier to stealth with than the jb3. Even if you don’t stealth now, you can always have it as an option.
Also, when you upgrade you can have an mp3 player. The jb3 is great, but I don’t exactly see myself taking it snowboarding/biking. Maybe putting it in a backpack, but it dosent really fit in your pocket. It’s the size, but also the shape.
I think you can get an I-river with a reasonable power solution for less than a comparable JB3. JB3 batts are running around $40 each, if you can even find them. Or a juice box from Todd R and a L-ion DVD batt. If you go the jb3 route I would buy the Jb3, Immediately sell the battery or batteries and buy the juice box/l-ion if you ever foresee a need to tape more than an opener and a main act. 6 hrs of record time is about all anyone I know can pull out of a jb3 w/o external power, and they don’t make these batteries new anymore, so it’s not going to get any better.
I am currently in the market for an i-river. Just waiting to find a deal on one. The code is open source, so that leaves the potential for major upgrades, like rockbox firmware and such. If anyone was going to mod the jb3 it would have been done, and I don’t consider having to file off some of the optical input to make the connections fit correctly a “mod”.
Just my 2cents.