Loving my iRiver H10

Author's Rating:

Pros: Compact, durable, easy-to-use appliance with loads of storage capacity.

Cons: Supplied earbuds are fairly useless, song management is dependent on WMP.

The Bottom Line: 
This device has changed my music-listening habits completely. It's well worth the investment.

Author's Review
Recently, the Rhapsody music downloading service ran an offer for a $100 rebate on the iRiver H10 (20GB) player, if you subscribed to Rhapsody's "To Go" subscription for a year. I took the bait.

And I'm quite pleased with my decision. The iRiver is durable, produces great sound quality (with a wide range of graphic equalizer pre-sets or SRS WOW output), and it can hold tons of songs. I like progressive rock, so many of my songs are long ones; yet, with 1200+ songs on my device, I've only used about one-third of the available space.

The earbuds they provide didn't stay in my ears. I prefer to line-out to speakers, anyway. And, I got an FM re-transmitter from Radio Shack, so I'm good in the car, too.

I tend to agree that battery life is a little limited. But, if you don't mess around with the lighted display much (such as simply listening in random mode at the office), I suspect you could get about 14 hours of use before needing to recharge.

Others have complained about having to scroll down through long lists. I see their point. But, you can set the scroll speed to 2x or 4x positions. It's not too bad, and honestly, most of my listening is just on "random" anyway.

There are a couple of features that don't have anything to do with MP3 that I also like. The device has a text browser, so you can import different .TXT files to have handy. I imported a list of area restaurant phone numbers, an address book of my friends, a work-related document that I have to refer to occasionally, and even the King James Bible!

You can equally enjoy the picture viewing capability of the device. I have loaded about 15 pictures of my family, so that I can show them off to people who want to see my iRiver.

There is a built-in microphone, so if you want to record a lecture (or a concert?), you can do that easily.

Lastly, it's really nice to have a very functional FM receiver on the device. You can even set it to power-up and record a particular station at a particular time (so you don't ever miss Marketplace on NPR, for example). The only problem with this feature is that the iRiver stays "on" after the pre-recorded program is done. So, you could wake up the next morning with a dead battery.

Two small complaints that I have are:

(1) The unit has "locked up" on me about 3 times in two months. All you have to do is stick a paper clip into a "reset" hole and it's back to normal, but it's still a little disconcerting.

(2) The Rhapsody To Go service allows you unlimited downloading of most of their library. You have to log in at least once a month to "re-authorize" your license on each song. But, if you want to be able to MANAGE the files on your iRiver, you have to rely on Windows Media Player (e.g., if you want to DELETE songs from your iRiver). Well, WMP doesn't interface with the Rhapsody license structure, so I'm frequently having to bounce between Rhapsody (for songs and playlists) and WMP (for text, pictures, and deleting) to get things done.