iRiver H10 6 GB

Author's product rating:   

Sound Quality	Excellent
Ease of Use	Simple
Look & Design	Excellent
Range of Features	Diverse
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Slim, Lightweight, attractive, easy to use, great sound quality
Disadvantages:	Bad customer service on the phone

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Features of the IRiver H10:

Hard Disk MP3 Recorder / Player
Radio - built in FM tuner & FM recorder
Voice & Radio Recording
Battery Life - 12 hours
Screen Size - 128x128 pixel (1.5 inch LCD)
Screen - high contrast with vivid colour display (260,000 colours)
Capacity - 6GB
Dimensions - 2.15 x 3.76 x 0.59 inches
Weight - 3.39 oz
USB 2
Supports MP3, WMA, JPEG & TXT files
32 - 320 kbps MP3 bit rate
32 - 192 kbps WMA bit rate
Capacity for more than 3,000 songs (about 100 hours of play time)
Vertical touch pad
Range of aluminium housing colours - Silver, Blue, Grey and Red
Microsoft Windows Media Player
Enabled for Photograph viewing
Windows XP Operating System
Also has a clock and alarm

Accessories Included With Your Purchase:

Disc with Windows Media Player version 10
USB Cord
Charger and Battery
Belt Case and Strap
High Quality IRiver Headphones

Extra Accessories You Can Buy:

FlexiSkin - Great soft skin in a range of colours to protect the player
ScreenPuff - Again in arrange of colours - soft and cleans the screen to a high polished finish
Mobile Mounting Kit - Great little device so you can mount the player in your car for easy access
Remote Control - Enables use when you're not even near the player - eg. Back seat of a car
Extra battery
Portable speaker system
Black leather case - again for protection
Docking cradle - not required but a nice little extra

All the above can be found online at very reasonable prices - alternatively Dixons sells most of them.

General Introduction:

After numerous problems my old Mp3 player died just before Christmas, and after a lot of research I decided to get the IRiver H10 (6GB) from dabs.com costing £116.32 plus a postage and packing cost of £6. I chose the Deep Red colour as it is the same colour as my old MP3 player and also matches my car.
You can also get 4GB, 5GB or 20GB IRiver H10's, but I felt that 20GB was too much both in size and cost and the 6GB suited my needs whilst leaving some extra storage space free for the future. I now have all my music stored in one place on my MP3 player - so much easier than messing around with all the files saved on my PC and various CDs.

I bought my IRiver the first week in January - and it has worked excellently ever since. I often make car journeys up to 8 hours in length, and it is so great to have such a wide range of music I can listen to - both in the car and in the hotels where I stay.

It looks great, feels so comfortable to hold - and impresses everyone who sees it.

I would definitely say this is one of the best purchases I have ever made.

Design:

The IRiver is slim and lightweight - and easily fits in my pocket. Its great to carry around and listen to on the street - its even lighter than my phone.
The aluminium casing is attractive - and as well as the deep red colour you can also get black blue and red ones.
I'm not very keen on the belt clip and protective case - I found the belt clip digs into my side and the protective case isn't particularly attractive. However, I solved the case problem by simply purchasing a smart black leather case - I don't use the belt clip but the IRiver and case fit perfectly in my pocket and the case means the casing is protected from scratching or damage if its dropped accidentally.
The colour screen is great - by far the clearest images I have seen yet on screens of this size. The only negative thing I would have to say about it is that once the backlight goes off the screen is unreadable - but this seems to be the same on all phones and things like this so its not a major problem.
After a quick read of the instructions I found the navigation very easy to manage.
As well as the main slider, the player also has 'select' and 'back' buttons on its front, 'volume' and 'play' buttons on its side and a 'hold' button on top. (The hold button ensures it doesn't get turned on accidentally when it's in your pocket).

Audio and Radio:

The radio is easy to program, operate and tune to all FM stations and the added bonus is the recording feature.
I found that even in areas of the country where I had no phone signal I still had a good signal from the radio.
Recording can be scheduled just like a video player so you can record programmes from the radio whilst you're in work and then listen to them at your leisure.
The sound quality is excellent, although I found slight distortion on a few songs if I pushed the volume above 35 (goes up to40). However, 35 is very loud anyway so this is no problem.
For the voice recording there are 3 quality levels. I found the low one not very good so I have only used it for recording either for long periods of time or when I didn't want to use up much space on the player.
Recordings are all in MP3 so they can be transferred to your PC and listened to on there as well.
The microphone allows up to 45 hours of voice recording.

Battery Use:

Included with the IRiver H10 is a rechargeable lithium removable battery with an AC/DC adaptor. One of the great things with this is the LED in the adaptor cord that shows when the battery is charging.
The documentation I received with the IRiver said the battery should last for 12 hours - however I have found it only really lasts for between 8-9 hours depending on usage.

Photography:

One of the great extras to the IRiver is the ability to display digital photographs - something I've never heard of any other MP3 player doing.
The photographs can be easily downloaded to the player via the PC - I was amazed at how quickly this could be done. I found you can simply drag and drop files (using the USB cable that comes with it).
The only down sides are that as the screen is fairly its sometimes a little difficult to see all the things on the photos, and you cant simply transfer photos straight from your camera onto the player - they have to go onto the PC first and then onto the player.

General Use:

Exceptionally easy to drag and drop files, view images and text files and play and record sounds and music.

I found navigation very easy and the transfer speeds between my PC and the player were really fast - it took me 12 minutes to transfer 4GB's worth of music onto the player.

Having used Windows Media Player on my PC for the last 3 years I was delighted to find the same on the player - making it so much easier to use.

The player is also compatible with Yahoo, MSN and Napster, which is a nice bonus.

Menus are easily controlled using the slider and files can easily be sorted (eg. For music by artist, album, genre and playlists).

I think my one complaint would be the customer service for this product - I originally tried emailing them about a simple question I had - but after 4 days of waiting for a response decided it would be easier to phone them directly. The person who answered was very pleasant - and agreed to check my query and call me back later on that day to give me the answer. However, it wasn't later on that day - it was actually 3 days later. Rather a slow response really.