Way back in August last year, I wrote about the newly-released iriver U10. I always liked the specs and looks of the little beastie, so when the time came to replace my current mp3 device, I picked up a refurbed iriver U10 512MB. In case you’re wondering how it works with no visible buttons, you actually click the edges of the screen to navigate the menus.

Summary: pretty nice. The screen is absolutely gorgeous, and the interface is mostly intuitive. FM radio gives excellent reception, and with the latest firmware it integrates perfectly with the sexy new Windows Media Player 11. I swore off WMP previously because it was a bloated, slow piece of crap, but release 11 is fantastic. The one thing it lacks is built-in podcast reception, but you can get around that with something like Doppler and smart playlists.

Upsides:

• Browse by ID3 tags (artist, album, genre).
• Good FM reception, one-off scheduled FM recording.
• Gorgeous screen.
• Direct-click interface is sweet.
• The ‘Hold’ button actually stops the physical motion of the direct-click screen thing, so you can easily feel when the device is locked.

Downsides:

• The mapping of Up/Down to FFWD and RWD when playing is counter-intuitive, but the only option when Right is mapped to Play/Pause.
• FFWD/RWD speed is a tad too slow to resume 30-minute podcasts. Not the worst I’ve encountered, because you can define a faster scan speed in the settings, but even at full speed it takes maybe 60seconds to scan through a 30-minute file. Some sort of accelerating scan speed (like on my ancient Dell DJ) would have been ideal.
• The screen gets smudgy. BUT a little cleaning pad thing is included with the soft case.

The price was also pretty good, probably because the iriver Clix has been recently announced. The Clix is a 2GB version of the U10 with a slightly faster chip, and additional UI features (album art, ratings, etc.). Given my experience with the U10, I’m actually very tempted to have a look at a Clix when it comes out locally.

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