MP3 Gaze

“be prepared for the truth of what future of entertaiment is all about” - iRiver’s words not mine. And no, I haven’t taken those words out of context, because there was no context. That’s the pulled-out banner headline thing on the press release. It starts with a lower case letter, contains no punctuation, spells things wrong and omits words.

It’s probably just translated, you say. Well translate it well then. It’s hardly like iRiver can’t afford to employ somebody capable. This is the iRiver X20’s slogan, for crying out loud. It’s reproduced throughout their website in exactly that form.

I’ll write them a new one: ‘Be prepared for the truth about the iRiver X20 - you’ll lose it inside a week’.

Here’s a conundrum for you: You’ve got the equivalent of 1,400 CDs on your MP3 player, but you’ve only got ‘up to 16 playback hours’. How do you justify that?

Obviously you don’t always want to listen to the exact same things and I understand that all your music’s there as an option, should you fancy a listen, but it still seems like a massive disparity to me.

Could a fat person run a marathon inside 16 hours? Possibly not. So is 16 hours sufficient battery life for a portable music player? No, it isn’t.

Apparently, the iRiver H320 allows you to read eBooks. Hands up who wants to take their chances reading a whole book on a two inch screen.

That two inch screen boasts 260,000 colours, which is a good many more colours than I can think of. iRiver don’t name the colours covered. But I believe that the iRiver H320 is blue-compatible and can also handle yellow and even magnolia.

It’s probably too small and runs out of battery life really quickly. I haven’t checked, but that’s the case with 99 percent of MP3 players and I don’t see why this one should be any different.

The iRiver H20 is, apparently, ‘a pocket jukebox’. This presumably means that you have to constantly pump it with coins to have something you want to hear drowned out by everyone talking.

There’s a refreshing honesty here. At least iRiver are acknowledging the frankly extortionate prices that they charge for these things.

If it truly is a pocket jukebox, it presumably plays 15 dreadful songs before starting yours just as you’re leaving.

Hang on a minute, you say. This is exactly the same as iRiver’s H10 Pure. And indeed it is. I’ve even used the same picture because I can’t be bothered uploading a second one.

After a lengthy comparison of the features of the H10 Color and the H10 Pure, I can now tell you how to distinguish between the two. The H10 Color has radio.

This seems to have had a further and unwelcome knock-on effect however. The already lame battery life of the H10 Pure has been further shortened to just 12 hours or ‘up to 12 hours’ in iRiver’s words.

This is a stupid spelling of ‘colour’ by the way, even if literally millions of you do think it’s ‘correct’.

“The feather-weight MP3 all-rounder puts more color in your life”

No, damn it. I don’t want more colour in my life. Colour’s distracting. Allow colour in your life and before you know it you’re having to actually THINK about what you’re going to wear in the morning. Far better to live a monochrome existence with more free time.

iRiver’s H10 Pure is 5GB in size, which is plenty big enough, unless you’re one of those people who likes to boast about how much music they’re going to lose in one go when their MP3 player gets stolen.

On the other hand, it’s got a battery life of ‘up to 16 hours’ which is pitiful at best.

Now this is revolutionary. iRiver have neatly side-stepped the whole tiny screen problem afflicting most MP3 players with video capabilities. They’ve made almost the whole of the U10 MP3 player a screen.

They’ve achieved this by including NO BUTTONS on it. Not one. I think you do stuff by jabbing at the screen with your finger, biro, flick-knife or used syringe. It looks like there’s a power switch on the side, which is a bit disappointing. It’d be better if you had to say ‘power on’ in a commanding, Jean-Luc Picard-style baritone. Never mind. No buttons is a good start.

So what are the drawbacks? Well I’m guessing that the battery life for video is embarrassing, because iRiver’s press release only states that it’s “up to 34 hours of playback for MP3 songs”. It’s what they DON’T tell you that’s crucial.

Another problem is that despite being all screen, iRiver have compensated for this, not by making the screen bigger, but by making the U10 smaller. It’s under 7cm long. I don’t know about you, but if I can lose a TV remote that’s twice the size, all the while knowing it’s within the room, I can sure as hell lose an MP3 player that’s the size of half a pencil.

It’s just a bag, isn’t it? It’s just a soft, brightly-coloured bag with the iRiver logo on that’s roughly the same size as the iRiver Clix.

It doesn’t even have holes cut out of it so that you can press buttons or look at the screen. It’s just a bag.

If you own an iRiver Clix, why not fold a piece of fabric around your beloved MP3 player and staple it together. Voila! An iRiver Clix pouch.

It’s crooked! Is it not broken?

Apparently not. Apparently it’s supposed to have a corner in the middle. That bit on the end’s so you can tie it down as well, which is just as well because at under 9cm, the iRiver T10 falls into the category ‘easy-to-lose small’.

Size: Easy-to-lose small.
Name: Starts with a lower-case letter, features a mid-word upper-case letter.
Battery life: 53 hours.

Verdict: One out of three - the one’s for the battery life, if you hadn’t guessed.