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 The Battery Life Sucks!!Dec 02, 2007
New to the Mp3 world in 2004 I originally went to Best Buy to buy the ipod mini's. I end up buying this one because I thought it was a lot better. I was very happy with what I had. I really like it. The problem is the battery. Once this battery is dead its over. Charging it won't do you any good either. Several times I had to send back and have iriver customer support resend me a new iriver because of the battery dying. Thank the Lord for the 1 year warranty. I spend the entire year sending and receiving a new iriver because the battery sucks. I still have my iriver and it still plays, but it plays for a few seconds or a minute if I am lucky because the battery sucks!! I paid a lot of money for this lol. I could store pictures but there was no screen saver. In addition, it was bulky but I don't have a problem with bulk at all. As long as its not ridiculously bulky. It was acceptable because it was 2004 lol. the Battery was the only reason I am giving this three stars. No one wants an MP3 player that they have to constantly send back and forth because every time the battery dies the thing becomes useless.
2 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Faulty product, disappointing service.Nov 30, 2006
I was promised a product that would be "like new". For $150, I received an iRiver with a battery that literally lasts only a few minutes, instead of the advertised 17.2 hours.
I spoke to the vendor about the battery, and he ignored the issue.
The iRiver came with its hard drive not formatted, I had to format it for it to accept mp3 files.
It was supposed to come with a remote control, which never came.
2 of 15 found the following review helpful:
extremely poor customer service!Oct 16, 2005
fine product.
extremely poor customer service I have ever seen.
I have contacted many times with them, they have NEVER answered me so far.
10 of 11 found the following review helpful:
iRiver gets the basics more than right.May 16, 2005
Following the successful release of the monstrous 40 GB H140, the iRiver H320 comes even more fully-featured than its predecessors.
The design of the MP3 jukebox has slightly departed from the old joystick controls and monochrome display, moving to a bright and vivid colour screen and flat navigational buttons.
There are two separate USB connectors, one for USB 1.1 and one for USB 2.0, the question is why the USB 2.0 was not just made backwards compatible seeing as they use the same plug. However, they each have a unique function. One plug is for the obvious transferral of music (the player rescans itself every time it is switched on. Consumers complain of the overly long loading times but it is understandable as, unlike the buggy iPod, the H320 identifies and fixes file problems during this rescan), and the other plug is for the transferral of purchased and copy protected music, requiring Windows Media 10 as standard.
While, it still retains its slightly chunky form factor, weighing in at just over 180 grams (compared to the iPod's 155 grams), it is slightly slimmer than its predecessors with a stupendous battery life clocked at over 17 and a half hours (using the typical non-replaceable Li-Ion batteries).
The colour screen, as well as surprisingly not sapping any battery life from the unit, is easy to read with large well-defined characters and the brightness enabling it to be seen even in direct sunlight.
Along with the colour screen and the new feature of being able to view pictures, the H320 comes with the additional features of a stable FM tuner that works well even in fringe areas and the ability to display and scroll text documents (there is a firmware upgrade enabling the H320 to simultaneously scroll lyrics in time with music). The picture viewing mode, while handy, is limited to JPEG and BMP files, like the iPod Photo, however, unlike the iPod Photo, there isn't an AV connection enabling you to display these pictures on your TV.
It seems that this feature was more conveniently tossed in to make the addition of a colour screen seem reasonable.
The departure from the traditional joystick controls and limited buttons is a stroke of genius on iRiver's part, making the iRiver more accessible than ever. The four-way rocker buttons make accessing and skimming through the file system a breeze, as well as the fact the this simple drag and drop file system is so similar to the Windows filing system that even a person with minor experience with computing could grasp this players system comfortably. However, a downside to this is a lack of music management software as well as the inability to easily group songs by category unless done manually, a long and tedious task.
In the Sound menu, you can choose your own treble and bass settings or set the SRS WOW system to your liking. The SRS helps some music feel spacious, but a single vocalist in some recordings can be masked by the surround effects. It's best in small doses. It was a bit disappointing that iRiver dropped their usual option of being able to fiddle with a 5-band equalizer, the range of equalizer settings was slightly limiting.
As with all iRiver products, the H320 has remarkable recording capabilities, well surpassing all similar players, allowing recording of up to 320kbps. There is also the addition of an optical line in, enabling direct "ripping" from most high-end portable CD players. However, as this ripping is in real-time there is no automatic splitting between tracks or identification of albums, artists etc.
Surprisingly though, unlike its relative recording functions, playback does not support lossless compressions and raw compressions such as WAV files, supporting compressed formats such as MP3, WMA, and ASF at up to 320 Kbps and Ogg Vorbis up to 500 Kbps. While these formats at their highest quality can emulate high quality audio fidelity, for perfectionists with high-end audio gear, lossless compression is a nice feature and the firmware updates have yet to deliver this.
As part of the gear included there is a pair of iRiver earphones made by none other than the well-respected Sennheiser (they are actually re-badged MX-300's), and as such, provide more than adequate quality sound for ear-buds.
The iRiver maybe a bit pricey for most, retailing at nearly $300 retail (on Amazon) and the color screen and photo viewing capabilities are more convenient than a reason to go buy H320 but for those of you with a bit of cash and who want or require high quality, advanced features, not minding a slightly chunkier player; this would be one of your first choices.
78/100
Pros: Near perfect audio quality with Lossy Codec's. Easy navigation with the addition of a color screen. Excellent recording capability. Displays photos, text. Literally a Plug and Play device. Astounding battery life.
Cons: No menu listing by identifiers such as artist and album. Surprisingly lacks lossless compression codec's. No slide show mode or TV mode for photos. Pictures displayed are of a lower resolution. Frustratingly slow scrolling using the rocker wheels, especially in large song collections.
Overall: Missing a few key features, nevertheless, iRiver has once again come out with an Mp3 jukebox perfectly catering for those geeks and audiophiles who know what they are doing, and the others who want to look like they do.
Alternatives: iPod Photo - iPod's popularity is warranted, being one of the easiest and most fun to use MP3 players on the market, the clickwheel was an innovation on Apple's part, it is easy to see why they are so popular. The colour screen of the iPod Photo is even more useful than the iRiver H320's and displays at a higher resolution. However, lacking the ability to support Windows Media Codecs and some other popular codecs as well as the strong protection against music sharing makes this a slight turn off for audio geeks.
Olympus M:Robe 500i - While the use of a full touch colour screen, integration of a digital camera, inclusion of a dock and wired remote seems like a techno dream, Olympus pulls this M:Robe off poorly. With uninspiring LCD screen that lacks brightness and tends to display pictures in a rather cold light and a frustrating interface, the M:Robe 500i is the not the easiest MP3 player to use. Being rather pricey, the buggy nature of its audio playback and the poor battery life makes this more of a show-and-tell player for the rich and very rich. At least its dock and chrome finish look very stylish.
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Not completely intuitive, but worth figuring out.May 15, 2005
The reviewer just before me should have read the manual a third time! You most certainly can browse by artist, album or genre; if he/she can't, there's something wrong. (Press the blue "NAVI" button, and you should see four icons for "FILE / ARTIST / ALBUM / GENRE.")
This player, for the cost of a 20GB iPod or less (and far less than the iPod Photo), allows you to use a file tree structure (including drag-n-drop from Windows); browse by artist, album or genre; use playlists; store and display photos (though, unlike the iPod photo, not while listening to music); get great FM reception; record voice or FM (and can break FM recording into separate MP3s for each song); use great audio options; read text files using the built-in .TXT document reader (store your to-do list or phone book on your player!); and it has an astounding battery life (I normally charge it once a week or less, though I probably listen less than most people), not to mention the full-color LCD screen.
Some people have also commented that the case doesn't allow you to access the buttons. They must have an older version, because my case has a cut-out for the buttons; the only things you can't access with it on are the two USB ports (and why would you need a protective case while it's connected to the computer anyway?). One problem with the case, though, is that the clip is screwed together, so as it swivels (which happens as you're wearing it), it can unscrew and the player can fall off (having dropped it several times while in the case, this is not a major problem, i.e. it doesn't hurt the player, but it is annoying).
The UI is a bit clunky, that's true-some of the buttons do different things in different menus. But it took me about three days to completely figure out the whole thing (and that's only a few hours a day; I don't listen while I'm at work or asleep!), with the exception of playlists, which I didn't add until a few weeks later (but took only a few hours to figure out). In any case, the player itself is so great that it's worth figuring out.
The only thing I haven't done yet is download music from online music services. Right now I have about 180 CDs burned as 64Kbps .wmas (since that's "CD quality" and obviously a track can never be of better quality than its source, so why waste space by increasing the bitrate?) and a handful of 128Kbps and 192Kbps MP3s, for a total of 3GB; and a few dozen 1024×768 photos. Total usage is around 4.5 GB including the player's files.
One thing that I had to get help on (hint: misticriver.net's forums are far better than iRiver's tech support) was the player's not recognizing ID3 tags when browsing by artist/album/genre or when using playlists-it just skipped certain files. In any case, the issue is that the player can't support filenames over 52 characters (except in File Tree format). You can download a utility (TDT, Tag Database Tool) to use to transfer files to the player, which will also truncate the names as it does so (so for example, the file "02 - Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of - U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind.wma" becomes "02 Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of.wma"). TDT also can make playlists, though WinAmp is perfectly adequate for the job.
In any case, using TDT solved my last remaining problem (actually, I had to both use it to put files on the player, then let iRiver's software sync the database), and it now works perfectly.
I know this isn't a very complete review, but I just wanted to (1) correct some incorrect things in other people's reviews and (2) share some things I wish I'd known before I started using the player. People below have already done a great job of raving about features.
Oh, and in my area there's been a rash of muggings of iPod users because iPods are in such demand. Another reason to buy a different player!
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based on 67 reviews
