iRiver H10 5GB

Posted 07/01/2005 at 10:31am | by

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Chasing the iPod Mini

Only slightly larger than the iPod Mini, the H10 includes a 1.5-inch color screen with photo display capability, an FM tuner, line-in recording, custom five-band EQ, and text document display, to boot. Music transfer is handled through the bundled Windows Media Player 10, which is nowhere near as simple and graceful as iTunes, but works reasonably well and supports online music services that use Windows Media DRM (such as Napster-To-Go).

The bundled Sennheiser earbuds are better than what usually ships with players, but they’re not good enough to dissuade us from buying a pair of higher-quality buds. The default EQ sounded weak in the low-end, but avoid the sound-mangling EQ presets and head straight to the custom EQ.

The H10 is a natural competitor to the iPod Mini, but it suffers when the two are directly compared. The touch strip seems like a good control solution, but it’s infinitely less usable than the iPod’s scroll wheel. When you start a track with the volume set too loud, you’ll be stroking the strip hysterically trying to save your hearing instead of just circling your fingertip around the wheel. The color screen is smaller and less sharp than even the piss-poor screen on the iPod Photo, line-in recording requires the (optional) H10 dock, and as a text file viewer, well, you’d have to be really desperate to read anything on this screen. We’d expect a feature-mongering player like the H10 to support OGG files, but it doesn’t. And unlike many players we’ve reviewed that exceed their stated battery life, the iRiver H10 fell far short of the 12 hours listed in the specs, gasping its last breath at just over 9 hours.

iRiver is a daring company, but the H10 is far from its best effort, and can’t compete with the iPod Mini when it comes to the simple task of playing your music the right way out of the box.
--Logan Decker

+ BABBLING BROOKS: Color screen, five-band custom EQ.

- BABBLING CROOKS: Obnoxious hardware interface, weak bass.

Month Reviewed: July 2005
Verdict: 7
URL: www.iriveramerica.com