Overall Good Buy

Author's Rating:

Pros: Decent sound, good battery life, nice interface, intuitive controls, durable

Cons: Non-removable battery, only supports mp3 and wma, slow navigation, somewhat bulky, supports only one OS

The Bottom Line: 
A good player, but not the best player in the market at this point.

Author's Review
The H10 is not my primary mp3 player anymore, but I still consider it to be a good mp3 player.

Aesthetics
It is a bit bulky, but it is really not that bad. I thought it was a lot bigger than it was by looking at the pictures, so when I finally opened it I was surprised as it was smaller than I thought it was. This was about 2 years ago, though so it is definitely a bit bulky by today's standards.

Installation and Use
As far as I know it is only compatible with Windows XP, so that is a con. But it is easy to install and use on Windows XP and I had no problems with it.

Interface/Controls
The interface is nice and I felt that the controls were intuitive. However, you can't adjust the scroll speed that much and with 500+ artists on my H10, I felt that it took longer than necessary to scroll even at the highest speed. Other than that, I found the interface and controls to my liking.

Performance
The audio quality is definitely nice and the battery life is great. When I tested it it fell about an hour short of the battery life stated on the iRiver site, but an hour off is not a big deal to me since the stated battery life was 12 hours.
However, it only has support for mp3 and wma files. When there are mp3 players that have support for other audio formats such as ogg vorbis as well as mp3 and wma files, I feel that this can be considerd a con.
The iRiver is also really quite durable. I've dropped it too many times to count and it still works quite well.

Features
Aside from playing music, there is a radio and you can store photos and text. There is also a record function that you can use to record memos or program to record at certain times. I used the record function often to record a morning show I loved because I always had to miss the majority of it due to school.
The photo feature is decent but the screen is a little small, but it is all right. I don't recommend using it for photos. It also only supports JPEG format.
The text section is all right, I didn't really use it often but it worked all right. It was glitchy at first, but a firmware update fixed it. The firmware update can still be found on the iRiver website.
The radio function was great, but I didn't use it for music (that's what the mp3 was for), just to listen to my morning show. The quality is good and it is easy to use. You can save your favorite stations, but it is necessary to check how to do it from the manual.

Overall
Despite all the good things I've said about the H10, I don't recommend it. It is pretty expensive, and who honestly needs 20GB? I used about 5/20, which was a bit of a waste. And there are many mp3 players on the market now that are smaller, have support for more audio formats/operating systems, have better battery life, etc. Basically, it's a good player, so you'll have a good quality player if you buy it; however, you can get better mp3 players for less money nowadays, so I don't recommend. Also, the H10 has been discontinued, although they still have a support page online for it.