Why iRiver H/IHP

dont suppose dixons\ somewhere else do a student discount

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

Or for the same money you could get the Cowan M3L with thirty five (yes, 35) hour battery life from here for the same price, and same (and better) features.

it costs £259 which is €380 which is not including the postage, the iRiver 20GB is €300 in town

I've been using an iRiver (H120) as my main portable mp3 player for the last year or so. Before that, I had a Zen. I've also dabbled with the iPod for a couple of weeks or so. And here's what I think.

user interface
In terms of user interfaces, the iRiver is at the bottom of the three I have used. Its awful click-wheel-joystick is an absolutely awful idea, and is truly unintuitive. I sometimes use my iRiver to play at parties/friends houses, and when this happens, it's usually only myself that can control the thing because noone else can be bothered wrestling with it. And the idea of "press this button for one feature, press and hold for another" is just a waste of time. I know people might defend this by saying it's part and parcel of a large feature-set, but I really don't think there's much of an excuse for not spending a bit more time coming up with an intuitive user interface.

The Zen's scrollwheel was nice and simple, and allowed me to quickly zip through my music collection. And the iPod.. well, noone can argue that Apple don't invest a lot of time and energy into creating usable interfaces.

feature set
In terms of amount of features, the iRiver must surely come out on top. God bless it, it tries to do everything -- definitely a jack of all trades. However, the full line is "jack of all trades, master of none", and that's exactly the case here. In MP3 playback, there is a short (1/2 second) gap in between songs, as it tries to read in the ID3 information. Some people have tried to defend this by saying it's "a nice way of taking a break from the music", but it's inexcusable. It's a nasty, jarring bug that makes listening to songs that run into each other (like in a live recording) unpleasurable. Then there's the really awful shuffle mode that has been scheduled to be replaced since May of this year (and I'll touch on this later), which makes shuffle almost completely non-random. When you have 20GB of music on there, and it sticks to the same 5 albums, you have to wonder.

Until the iPod Photo, the iPod did just one thing and did it superbly. If you wanted any of the other features that the iRiver gave (like radio, recording), you had to buy third-party peripherals.

customer support
I have no experience of Apple's customer support, but I have plenty of experience of iRiver's customer support. Basically, screw the existing customer, appeal to the potential customer. One of the major selling points of the iRiver for me (and many, many others) was the "Firmware upgradable". Looking at the iRiver site, when I bought it, they had a list of future firmware updates and the features they would give. Well, the dates for these firmware updates came and went, and.. nothing. No announcement from iRiver. Months later, still nothing. People got itchy and started asking if iRiver had abandoned them. Then it made the front page of slashdot. Shortly after, iRiver released a firmware update, but not the one they promised. They released a stripped-down firmware update, promising that the features they missed out on would be tackled in the next firmware update, which was to come out in a couple of months. Well, that was a long, long time ago, and they still haven't released that promised firmware update.

So screw that.

cormie wrote:

All of the above is correct information but I still don't think it makes any other player on the market better than the iRiver.

I don't think anyone is even slightly surprised to hear you say that

cormie wrote:

The firmware update is bother but even with the flaws like no gapless, true shuffle etc, it does everything else perfectly.

Well, there are also other things that can drag it down, that I didn't mention.

startup times
I can't say if this is a similar problem in the rest of the iRiver range, but in my IH120, the startup time is ridiculous. It was fine when I had it a quarter full, but after loading it up to two-thirds - three-quarters full, it's gotten awful. It takes roughly a minute to start up, each time. One of the benefits of the iPod's keep-it-simple-stupid approach is that it's got near-instant startups, presumably because it's trying to do less. This is almost enough to drive me away from the iRiver alone.

aesthetics
When most average people pay upwards of EUR400 for a piece of consumer electronics, they want it to not look cheap and tacky. This is primary reason why the iPod is so popular and the iRiver is mainly popular among geeks (people who have very little style and are willing to sacrifice this for nifty geek-friendly features.. like ogg support (it's fair for me to say this because I did it myself)).

The iRiver looks.. well.. cheap and tacky. Especially in its case - the faux leather with plastic screen look can even make phones look awful, why apply them to something like an MP3 player? It pains me to see this.

cormie wrote:

iRiver customer support is great besides the update scene. However they are spilling out allot of new firmwaves recently. Let's just hope the IHP one arrives soon.

We were promised three firmware updates since May. In the seven months since the initial firmware update was planned, we've received.. two. And both of these barely cover the changes affected by the first "promised" update. Spilling? Trickling.

cormie wrote:

I just tested mine, 25 seconds exactly from when I press play till I hear music. I have 37GB full.

I timed mine - fully 20 seconds more than yours, at 45 seconds startup. This could be because I carry a lot of non-music on mine. I have approximately 6 1GB files on there. But whatever the reason, this is almost almost inexcusable behaviour. The zen got around this by having a "shutdown" and a "standby" state - coming back from "shutdown" took about 30 seconds a pop, but coming out of "standby" was almost instantaneous. In this case, the iRiver is being outsmarted by an inferior piece of technology.

cormie wrote:

I don't actually think it looks bad. It looks like a good piece of kit. Like it means business and what not. Anyone who has €400 to blow on a fashion accessory... well good for them but it won't make them any better of a person.

It might make me more of a shallow person, but I go the opposite way. If I spend €400 on something, I want it to look like I spent €400 on it, and not have it look like something thrown together by a child.

Actually, yes, that does make me sound incredibly shallow.

cormie wrote:

Case protects it. Check it out in the iSkin, Looks very cool indeed, I have the ebony one. Nice!

Strangely enough, I found out about the iSkin last night in the pub when someone showed me their iPod mini.. "Check it out, it glows in the dark too!" "Whoa.. what the hell is this?" "It's an iSkin.. you should get one for your iRiver" "Oh man, I'm so there."

I'm putting my order in today.

I have a iHP120 and I also hate the gaps between songs, did they ever say it could be fixed with new firmware? what things did they promise to fix with firmware?
I also hate the startup time too. The user interface is poor but I have now mastered the remote and it is fine, I don't like the iPod interface either.
I don't think the iPod or Iriver look great and don't really care, if the iRiver came emblazoned with an image of eamon dunphy in the raw on it I would still have got one. They are music players not poncy fashion accessories.

geeks (people who have very little style and are willing to sacrifice this for nifty geek-friendly features.. like ogg support (it's fair for me to say this because I did it myself))

anti-geek: people who like to consider themselves "stylish", who will gladly fork out money on highly advertised goods whos advertising can often make up the main costing to the manufacturer (budweiser, nike etc) and are willing to sacrifice money and quality in favour of superficial "good looks".

cormie wrote:

Re Start-up Time:
Well in the long run, what is 45 seconds to you? I'm sure they could implement the standby mode but is it really that important?

For every one of those 45 seconds, I'm thinking "maybe I should move away from the iRiver". Once the music has started, I care a little less about it. But it's still a major problem with the iRiver.

And for the record, the Zen's battery life was easily comparable to the iRiver, with heavy use of the standby mode. This was probably because its "standby" wasn't so much like a TV standby but more like a laptop's "hibernate" mode, where its state is written to disk, so it can be called up instantly. But this is a different architecture, and I'm just giving this as an example of another, similar product without this problem (another example would be the iPod).

cormie wrote:

I really don't think the iPod is that much better looking than the IHP. If that is all that matters, I saw an article in a newspaper on how to make your own ipod, all you needed was a walkman, tip-ex and there were paper cut-out buttons provided.
Choice is yours, you want music, you want the iRiver,
you want fashion and looks, you want iPod.

I really didn't want this to become an "iPod is shit" "No it isn't" thread -- I genuinely just wanted to point out some of the flaws in the iRiver and have done my best to keep it on topic -- but since so many people want to push it that way, fair enough.

What strikes me about your quote (and the other person who replied complaining about non-geeks buying iPods) is the extremely short-sighted and ridiculously simplistic way you're approaching this. What you both seem to forget (or can't be bothered to take into account) is the fact that the iPod is first and foremost, a music player. "You want fashion and looks, you want an iPod". Well, no. What you conveniently left out there was the fact that the iPod also plays music. What your sentence should have read was "You want music, and fashion and looks and are willing to pay a premium for these, because you value these over.. I don't know.. the ability to play .ogg and listen to the radio, then you want the iPod".

Honestly, it's like penis envy.

Seriously, by glossing over the iRiver's faults and being completely unable to speak objectively about the iPod, you're not really selling your case very well.

I recently got the H340 and Im finding it excellent. The user community is quite strong, and its nerdish tendencies mean that there are a number of freeware apps for things like improving the database and editing the gui. It connects as a generic usb mass storage device and can also itself host other devices (like digital cameras/usb sticks or other irivers) for easy file transfer.

Plus the comments about the ipod being more stylish. Well the ipod is plastic, the iriver is metal and is generally more solidly built.

There is also a Korean firmware upgrade to allow it to play video which was an added bonus I didn't expect!

The only slightly annoying things are the poor remote and the case (which doesn't let you access the functions).

davej

Okay, Cormie, I assume this is the "Cormac" I know, but I don't want to blow your cover. Hows the MP3 tagging coming along, still have some file corruption since I gave it back to ya?

I just did a test on my 30 GB iPod (that has 11 megs free space) to see what startup time I got. From pressing play to hearing sound: ... about 2.3 seconds

The battery life isn't as bad as people say, I'm on my second ipod (first was stolen) and I've had it a year and 7 days now. I still get 6 hours playtime. If you don't have the luck I have with the battery YOU CAN REPLACE IT!

Buy one here (only 15 dollars) and follow the instructions here.

I think the point you're missing about the iPod is that it's and MP3 player and that's all it tries to be. It doesn't give any false promises about what it does or will do (like the iRiver; seemingly), and it plays MP3s perfectly, every time. It has by far the best UI (I actually used the new Creative Zen yesterday with it's vertical touch sensitive thing, much more awkward for long lists). I used your iRiver and found it to be possibly the most frustrating task in the world! It has a little fiddly rocker control thing that you seem to have to push half way into the machine to press. The screen layout is terrible and ... it's big and ugly!

Can you get it built into your BMW? I think not.

I never knew until now that it doesn't support playlists, and for me that alone would make me not buy it.

Kev Pattison

You've obviously reorganised the music I gave you. I had it so that Leonard Cohen was filed under "C" but anyway.

about the iRiver: you're wrong. And I can also single handedly control the iPod at high speed.

By the way, I'm gonna spray paint mine metallic grey!

later.

kevpatts wrote:

Buy one here (only 15 dollars) and follow the instructions here.

There are far better ipod batteries out there for a few $ more

cormie wrote:

When ordering from the US you have to take into account import duties. This will be 21% of quoted value of product on package, so say if you bought it from site for $300 ex delivery, you will be charged 21% of $300=$63, your total will be $363+Delivery so. It probably does still work out cheaper but there is something re-assuring getting from UK online as opposed to US online. To buy in an Irish retail shop is by far the best option, but the high prices discourage this. You shouldn't have any problems with the US model. Just one thing, what did you order? H1XX or H3XX?
EU and US H3XX are different.

You will be charged more than that. I was charged VAT AND duty on the cost of the item AND the postage cost. Then they throw on a handling fee too, this was about €11.
If you order from ebay most will mark it as a gift of low value so you pay no duty or vat.
I have a US h120 and have no problems. Needed a convertor so it fit in an irish socket, this came with it on ebay. The charger, like most these days, is rated for 100-240V