This is an unfortunate oversight to an otherwise excellent player. There is a workaround, though, which is this: If you know you are going to have to resume the file, just shut it off WHILE it is still playing. When you turn it back on, it will resume at the correct place. If you pause it, and it auto-shuts off, it starts all over.
I really, really hope they fix this in a firmware update. I still love the player for the $60 price tag, but since I’m a podcast guy, I get bit by this quite a bit. I have also turned the auto-shut off period to 30 minutes (the max) to give me longer when I’m pausing to do a something else to return before the cast gets reset. But this wastes power more often than not.
If they can’t fix this, it would be really great to have one more step in the fast forward speed. Like 5 seconds > 15 seconds > 30 seconds > 1 minute. Right now at the maximum skip speed you can only skip a minute every five seconds. Doing a minute every second would greatly overcome the lack of resume feature, as I could blast to the middle of a 40 minute podcast in 15 seconds or so rather than several minutes.
One last piece of advice for the podcast/audio book people annoyed by the Express: search for a good freeware or shareware MP3 splitter. These programs take longer MP3s like audio book tracks and podcasts and chop them up into sequential bites of how ever long you want them. Then you can just advance to the next track to get to the next five minute segment.
