By WILSON ROTHMAN
One of the hot new MP3 players of the season is the iRiver H10, and not without reason. It's going up against the iPod Mini and Creative's Zen Micro with a color screen, a trim body and a stylish icon-based interface. For those not yet sold on Apple's iTunes Music Store, it's also a way to get at Napster's portable subscription content; $15 a month loads it to the brim (though all of those tunes expire when you stop paying). Trouble is, the player itself has too many bugs and design flaws to be taken as a serious contender just yet.
Its user interface dishes out frustrations. Because there are buttons on both sides of the player, pressing the on/off button often means pressing the track-advance button as well (and vice versa). The vertical touchpad creates repetitive stress as your thumb scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, ten artists or tracks at a time. The flaw that grieves me the most is the LCD screen that shuts off entirely when not in use. Other players sensibly shut down their backlight but leave the LCD active, so that you can glance at song info while you're, say, driving down the highway. The iRiver's LCD and backlight are programmed jointly, which means that if you want to check what's playing, you have to reach over and fiddle with it or leave the backlight on, draining the battery.
Speaking of batteries, the player does deliver the advertised 12 hours, and has a removable battery so you can double up if you really wanted. But the Creative Zen Micro also has 12-hour battery life, and Apple just raised the bar to 18 with its newest Minis.
Perhaps the worst thing about the H10 is that its one advantage, a color screen with photo ability, has been absolutely squandered. The developers put their faith in Microsoft's Windows Media 10 program for photo management. It's like asking the Jiffy Lube folks to clean your house. WM10 is good at some things, but not photo stuff. The result is confusion on both sides. Not only is it difficult to impossible to preview shots in WM10, when I commanded the program to send a select group of photos to the H10, it failed. It told me it had successfully synched the shots, but they didn't show up on the player under "Photos" (where a yokel like me might think they'd be a-hidin'), nor were they under "Browser," the H10's catch-all file viewer. It's still a mystery—if you know the secret, by all means, write me.
Is there anything I actually like about the iRiver? The answer, feeble as it is, is its potential. If iRiver and its software partners Microsoft and Napster were serious about taking on Apple, they could do it. They'd just need to spend a lot more money on software development (a little QA testing wouldn't hurt) and a little less on marketing. If you already have an H10, there's a bit of good news: iRiver is posting a major bug-fixing firmware upgrade on April 1st. Let's just hope it doesn't turn out to be a joke.
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