For what it's worth I have an OP-1, bought it 1-2 years ago when it was £800 - and I thought it was expensive then! Anyway, my opinion will not be useful compa

For what it's worth I have an OP-1, bought it 1-2 years ago when it was £800 - and I thought it was expensive then! Anyway, my opinion will not be useful comparatively, since it's my first and only piece of electronic music hardware, only other stuff I have is guitars, amps etc. I can tell you it's been very fun, very reliable (only once I froze it when using a combination of a lot of effects at once with settings I imagine probably took up too much memory), battery lasts for ever (due to CPU type etc), it has a lot of depth, I still haven't figured out how to use absolutely everything, features are very discoverable and learning curve is pretty linear. Some of it is "programmy" as you describe for the POs, but it's also plenty intuitive and direct with the built in keyboard, which I appreciate because my musical background is mostly instrumental. The main reason I got it is for the very thing that makes it unique, it's tiny, all in one, it's got almost everything you need and is fun - I know it's not the best value for money or the best audio or best effects etc etc, but I don't want to make music on my computer, and I don't want to start out with loads of independent devices to manage and wire together... I appreciated the idea of something I could grab and play with to encourage me to play with electronic music more, and it total achieves that. The only thing I feel like I miss sometimes (and this is considering I have never owned any other electronic music hardware), is more keys, for the form factor I can't argue, but I think the next thing I would buy is a midi keyboard, I've tried programming longer pieces but it never fits in the sequencer. [edit] My single gripe in out of all the design/quality is key debouncing (it doesn't have velocity keys), which doesn't seem to catch enough... sometimes I can exploit it to effect, but most of the time I don't want it - it's occasional, like maybe 1/50 if i'm not being very careful and just hammering rather than pressing. I should probably try updating the software though as this may have been improved. I doens't bother me massively though, like I said it's the only thing.