IRiver H340 40 GB > Reviews > If you have the money, get one.

Author's product rating:   

Sound Quality	Excellent
Ease of Use	Average
Look & Design	Good
Range of Features	Excellent
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Clear, bright colour screen, excellent sound quality, good price, made of bricks .
Disadvantages:	idiots will ask you why you didn't buy an Ipod .  ;)

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I've tried a few mp3 players, and of the hard disk based ones, this is by far the best i've used.

I had an archos FM recorder before, which was pretty decent at the time, but it was big and bulky, and the build quality was pretty bad. Not so with the iRiver. It's a monster. It's pretty small, but it's got a great 40GB space, and it feels indestructible. It's incredibly well made.

It plays mp3 and Ogg and WMA, the only 3 audio formats you're likely to come across on the net, and the sound quality is fantastic.

Useful for me, and other photographers on the go, this model wil connect to your camera via the built in USB controller, letting you transfer your pictures onto the iRiver's hard drive. Hey presto! A 40GB memory card. That's a whole lot of pictures. I usually carry 2x512MB SD cards around with me, and transfer everything from them onto the iRiver once a day, when i'm away from my PC. It's incredibly useful. The iRiver will even control other MP3 players, letting you transfer songs to and from them. You can store whatever you want on your iRiver, because it mounts itself as an additional external hard drive on your pc, allowing you to drag and drop. No DRM nonsense here. :)

There's an FM tuner, but i generally hate listening to the radio, it's the same rubbish over and over here in the UK, there's hardly any difference between any of the stations, so i can't really say much about it. What is there to say about an FM tuner anyway? It works, and without any noticeable interference from the unit itself. You can record the radio to mp3, if you so wish.

The only problem i've come across is the silly user interface, but given a day or 2 with this unit, you'll stop pressing the wrong buttons, and you'll be fine. It's a small price to pay for such a versatile and well specced MP3 player.

Finally, the tech specs. I've left them until the end, because these are less important than my opinion, as you can get the specs all over the net, and on iRiver's site.

Quoting from iriver.com:

- 40GB internal memory holds up to 10000 songs, 2.0" TFT-LCD
Display
- Up to 16 hours of playback with internal Li-polymer rechargeable battery
- Plays MPEG 1/2/2.5 Layer 3, WMA, ASF, OGG, JPEG, BMP, TXT, FM radio
- Transfers files through Windows Explorer and recordings (voice, FM radio
Line in)
- Connects to USB 2.0 port for high speed data transfer
- Connects via USB 1.1 to a digital camera to display photos (excluding US
model; For more info on US version, please visit iriveramerica.com)
- Supports not only windows OS but also MAC OS

Now, as for the 10000 songs bit, that's being a bit generous. I've just checked, and the formatted capacity is 37.2GB. Every hard drive, unfortunately, isn't as big as it says it is. The hard drive industry tell many fibs to us consumers, but that's neither here nor there, it holds 37.2GB of music. Or photos. Or whatever you want to store on it.

With the average MP3 being about 192kbps, and the average album being 50 minutes long, that's 75MB per album, allowing just under 500 albums to be stored on the iRiver. I don't like pepole quoting numbers of songs etc, as it's meaningless. How long is "a song"? It's silly, and marketing nonsense. I currently have 21GB of music, 3.5GB of digital photos transferred straight off my camera, and 12GB of backups and things i might need when out and about on my iRiver.

iRiver quote 16hrs of battery life, and i must admit i get pretty near to that on most occasions. I rarely see less than 12hrs off a 3 hour charge, and that's with me tansferring from the camera, to my girlfriend's mp3 player, and all sorts. I only play mp3 and view jpegs on it though, i don't bother with OGG or WMA, so i can't comment on the effect that has on battery life. It just keeps going on and on. It's a built-in battery though, so once it's flat it's flat until you recharge it.