iRiver Flash mp3 player (iFP 790T)

[Archived in $100 - $200, MP3 Players, Products, iRiver]

Manufacturer: iRiver
Price at amazon.com: $160.95
Usually ships within 1 to 2 weeks

Product Features:

• Plays MP3, WMA und OGG music files
• Plays up to 8 hours of music
• Transfers music up to 3X faster
• Skip-free and sport-ready
• FM Tuner und Recorder

Product Description:

Average Customer Rating:

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Comment: Affordable flexibility with good looks Rating:
I bought this player primarily because it plays ogg files. For the uninitiated, ogg is an open source (free) format as opposed to MP3 (Fraunhofer labs) and WMA (microsoft). It also is far superior in quality to MP3 at the same bit rate. The installation is very smooth and the program looks just like a windows explorer window. The player is great even though some of the features (like FM radio) are not absolutely intuitive to access. But it is not a problem once you get used to it. The loading of tracks into the player is similar to drag and drop except that you have to use the special window (which prevents you from copying things back from the player... so be aware of this). 256M is enough
to hold about 3 hours of very high quality music (192kbps OGG).
I believe you can use this player to drag and drop non-music files between different computers though (so it can function
as a flash drive as well).

Upside:

1. Stylish design, small form factor. Perfect for Sports.
2. Plays OGG/MP3/WMA/ASF
3. Line in recording, FM recording etc.
4. Very affordable for the feature set.
5. Comes with arm band and pendant cord. Included set of earbuds
is also quite decent.

Downside:
1. Does not show up as a drive on windows (concession to the
DRM lobby I guess).
2. Controls are not intuitive (different buttons do different
things depending on how long they are pressed and in what
mode).

Posted at October 11, 2003 02:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)