I haven’t bought a new toy in months, and now that my company is getting serious about getting involved in digital distribution, I figured my next purchase would be a digital music player. Since I already have a Clie with a 512MB MS, I figured only a higher-end, hard drive-based player would be worth the upgrade cost. The iPod went right out due to its trendiness and lack of media format support and I swore a long time ago never to buy another Creative player. The Dell and Samsing/Napster players went out because, well, they look like they were designed by the same guy who designs the Dimensions. Yuck. That left the Rio Karma and the iRiver iHP.
I love the size and shape of the Karma, and I’ve heard great things about its clit… errr ... eraser-based navigation and the innovative networking abilities built into it. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of physical problems with the Karma (drives breaking down and such). It’s lack of a case or a remote sealed the deal. The iRiver it was.
The unit I bought was the iHP-140, the 40GB model. I’ll direct you to the iRiver site for good pics of the unit, since I suck as a photographer. The unit is about the size of an iPod. I have a comparison pic here alongside a TR1A and my trusty T616. I’m not terribly impressed with the central control. Despite it’s initial appearance, it’s a joystick, not an iPod Mini-style control pad. It makes the menus feel a bit less precise than they otherwise could. The stick controls volume, fwd, rev and the menu. The play, stop and repeat/shuffle buttons are strangely all on the right side of the unit. The placement’s not usual, but they are easy to find by touch and easy to press. The black case looks slick, but it suffers from the same fingerprint collection problem as the SE T616. If you are as anal as I am, invest in a microfiber cloth to carry around with you.
Putting data on the unit is a mixed bag. On one hand, not having to use drivers is a joy. I can move files to and from any USB-enabled computer easily and my directory structure remains consistant on the device. On the other hand, the player is unable to use DRMed music files like those downloaded from Napster 2.0 or MusicMatch. Also, the unit’s ID3 tag database isn’t automatically updated when you add a new song. You have to manually do it from a computer with the iRiver software installed. You can’t do it from the unit itself. Reports are that it can take up to 5 minutes to process the files and only MP3 files are indexed, even though the unit can read WMA, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files as well. It’s also limited to a 52-character pathname. This may sound like the kiss of death, but the player can read the file system itself rather well and an intelligently organized hard drive is just as good as a database of tracks. You can set it to repeat all files, one directory or shuffle within all files or a directory as well. The unit will display the tags properly while playing. Annoyingly, you can’t delete a file from the player. You must use a PC. Playlists are not well-handled. There is support for Winamp .m3u files, but playlists can’t be created on the fly by the player, unlike the latest iPod, nor is there software provided on the accompanying CD that will create them. :shock: Winamp or an m3u creator is easy enough to find and install, but what genius decided this was a good idea?
The remote is the best and yet most vexing part of the unit. The LCD is the feature that grabs everyone’s attention. For someone who deals with lots of remixes and alternate versions of tracks, this is a godsend. There are 3 rocker switches on the top and bottom of the remote that allow you to do anything you can from the main unit. In addition to the basics, you can change the eq settings, browse the hard drive for a song to play, explicitly turn the unit on and off, change the language to Czech and upgrade the firmware directly from the remote! The control scheme is a little unintuative at first until you figure out that holding a rocker switch down is different than a short press. iRiver still managed to do some strange things with their remote. It displays the song name (from the tag) and the name of the folder it’s in, but for some reason doesn’t show you the artist. :? The alligator clip is backwards too. Being right-handed, I typically clip the remote on my left side and expect that the clip hangs with the text upside down (so I can flip it up and read it easily). Here, it’s backwards. The clip is designed to be clipped on my left side. By far the strangest feature of the remote is the headphone jack. It’s slightly recessed, so not all headphones fit in it. There’s a 4-inch cord extender that fits in the recess and allows any mini din plug to fit. Even worse is that there is a bad connection in my extender cord and the sound will go in and out. Luckily, my headphones fit directly in the recessed in the jack. I’ll contact iRiver this week and see what they say, but it’s lame to need the cable at all, but even worse that it’s such a piece of crap.
The enclosed belt case deserves a special mention. It’s great that iRiver included a belt clip case with their device. There are cutouts for the power jack, USP jack, remote, joystick and all of the buttons. Unfortunately, the picture makes it look decent quality. It’s not fit for a $450 device. It’s brown (why??? the device is glossy black!), it’s so snug to be hard to get the device in and out and it is made of cheap leather. The picture makes it look better than it is. I suppose I should be glad that they do include a functional case with it, unlike most other consumer electronics.
I just opened the package tonight, so I don’t have any real-world experience with battery life or the usual problems you find as you get to know a piece of equipment. So far, I like it a lot. I recommend it with reservations, especially if you intend to buy music online.
I intend to add a couple of pics directly comparing the device to the Creative Nomad Zen NX and the iPod and some daily usage thoughts. Stay Tuned.
