I use only music, never video or radio, playing .mp3 and occasionally .wma, in MSC mode. In more than a year it has frozen just once or twice on me–once when I started trying to do something in MTP and it messed up the file system and needed a format (I could still get all the music off first, luckily).
But I DO run every album that goes on it through mp3tag to save tags as ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1–which takes all of about 3 seconds. Your friend may have files from all over the place with all kinds of tags, and that will freeze it sooner or later.
Don’t get it as a video player, because that seems to be a lot less reliable. But for music, as long as you feed it what it likes you won’t have any serious problems. On the other hand, if you grab stuff from the internet and just dump it on there without looking at it first, you’ll get freezes.
