iRiver iFP-195T 512 MB MP3 Player

[Archived in $200 - $300, Audio, MP3 Players, Products, iRiver]

Manufacturer: iRiver
Price at amazon.com: $234.99
Usually ships in 24 hours

New from $240.00

List price $349.99



Product Features:

• 512 MB built-in memory
• Supports playback of MP3, WMA, and ASF music files
• Integrated digital FM tuner with presets and built-in voice recorder
• Record to player directly from FM tuner
• Comes with Sennheiser MX300 earphones, custom carrying case, adjustable arm band, neck strap, AA battery, USB cable, and printed manual

Product Description:

Average Customer Rating:

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Comment: Excellent MP3 player, but not perfect Rating:
I've had this for about 6 months and its still working great. I'm definately happy with my purchase.

Pros:
Very small: not much bigger than the AA battery it houses.
Decent memory: about 4 CDs fit on it at a time
Good sound quality: the headphones that come with it are good and the device puts out good quality base and high end
Power: Uses 1 AA and it lasts a long time
Features: FM, record voice or FM, lots of settings for equalizer and play modes (repeat, shuffle, repeat folder, shuffle all etc), power saving featuers and more...

Cons:
Cant upgrade the memory
No AM radio
Its difficult to put the tracks in order (to mimic an album)

I saw some reviews saying that the parts were low quality, and while it does feel a little flimsy, mine has not broken or shown any signs of problems. I've dropped it plenty of times and it works good as new. Pay $15 for an extended warrenty if you're worried about it.

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Comment: 4.5 stars, a wonderful mp3 player Rating:
Pros: Half a gig of memory, FM tuner, FM and voice recording, small size and light weight. It uses a single AA battery and will run for about twice as long as any hard drive player. I'm getting an estimated 12 hours of real world use per battery. Compared to hard drive based units this can't be beat. Since it uses a single AA, you won't have any down time waiting for the unit to charge. The software that comes with this unit is stable, intuitive to use and works as advertised. I use this mostly for audio books recorded at low but adequate bit rates. Usually 24-48 mbps mp3's. Half a gig will hold about 30 hours of audio books. More than enough to take on vacation. Sound quality is as good as my iPod. The controls are not as intuitive as the iPod or Rio500 but if you spend 20 minutes or so with the manual everything will make sense. Navigating through content is a breeze. It's firmware upgradeable to support other formats and add or change features. Battery life is outstanding. Cons: Pricey. Subjectively cheap materials. Metal endcaps and a lanyard ring would have been a nice touch in a product that costs as much as this. I'd guess they used plastic to keep the weight down but I'd gladly sacrifice a quarter ounce for something that has a more 'quality' feel. If you're close to the end of a long audio book and stop the player, it seems to think you're done. It loses the marker and requires you to search for where you left off. Frustrating. A dedicated bookmarking button would have been nice.

Conclusion: this is probably the first go anywhere mp3 player with enough memory and battery life to be truly useful. Battery life far exceeds any hard drive player and doesn't require an electrical outlet. Simply pop in an AA battery and you're good for at least an honest 10-12 hours. Feature packed and mature in design. Hard drive players like the iPod, Karma and Zen are in a different catagory and shouldn't be compared directly with solid state players. If you need gigabytes of storage you'll have to go with a hard drive player. If you're ok with about four hours of high quality music or ~30 hours of high quality audio books, the iFP-195T is probably the best choice at the moment.

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Comment: Great Player Rating:
I did my homework before buying an MP3 Player, and I'm glad I did as the iRiver iFP-195T is great! No complaints. It fits approximately 75 songs and with just one little AA battery you get at least 20+ hours. Once you get the player I strongly recommend going to iriver.com to upgrade the music manager and firmware so you can "organize" the music files into folders on the player. Nice extra feature is the FM turner....never thought I'd use it, but guess what - I did. Overall, great product, small/compact and has a great user-friendly desktop application for transfer and organization of mp3s.

Posted at November 11, 2003 07:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)