What does it take to kill an iPod?
I think that’s the question on everybody’s mind these days, right up there with “Did Ashlee Simpson fuck up her SNL performance on purpose” and “Why do men have nipples?” The past two years have seen second-tier players (and indeed, who isn’t second-tier in an iPod World) one-upping each other on a monthly basis, fighting for the vaunted first runner-up position and a chance to maybe, just maybe, beat Apple at a game that it wrote the rules to.
@##@
Last September, iRiver unveiled its new flagship line, the H300 series, hoping to shift the five-way tug of war in their favor a little bit further …
And before I sound anymore like an editorial assistant from PCWorld (i.e., more than I already do), let me just say that I was literally hammering down my friendly neighborhood retailer’s door to make sure I was the first to get one.
I think what may have ultimately sold me was iRiver’s “Real Tech Geek Device” tagline, which seemed to be talking directly to me, for some reason. (It must be one of those “marketing” things, you know, like with research and surveys and stuff.) I wanted something that addressed my two basic concerns (disk space and battery life), and threw in as many cool extras as possible, which the H300 series seemed to have by the shitload.
The model I bought, the H320, sports a 20-gig hard drive (which explains the “20″ in its name, if only partially) and up to 16 hours of playback on a single charge. (I’ve only been able to get 12 hours, though, which is still fairly decent considering I’m the sort of guy who turns this thing on when I wake up, and then leaves it on until its batteries deflate.) Oh, and it has a 262,000-color screen too which is pretty charming considering it’s currently the only player in the world with one (as of 4:03 pm, 24 October 2004). It also comes with an inline remote, which is a pretty standard option for HDD players these days, and supports pretty much every music format that matters (MP3, WMA, OGG, ASF).
In terms of sound quality, the iRiver is top-notch. It comes with some fairly decent Sennheiser earbuds, which are more than enough for your average user and probably much, much better than the generic earbuds that most other players come packaged with (the iPod being the exception I suppose). I’ve always been more of a fan of the music itself than the technology that goes into its reproduction, so I don’t require high-end stuff like Sony Nudes or Grados (although if a kindly old sound enthusiast were to accidentally leave a pair in my gadget bag, well then, I’d just say I lost them).
The visibility on the 2-inch LCD is also pretty good. I have pretty weak eyes, but I can read the song titles comfortably at about 3 feet away. Just don’t expect to be able to keep this on top of your home stereo and be able to make out the letters from across the room.
Although I’m mostly satisfied with how it looks, I do wish there was a way to rearrange the info screen a little. The entire lower half of the display is taken up by the animating channel and volume bars, which seems like an awful waste of space when you consider that lengthy band names like “And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead” are squeezed in at the top half of the screen by truncating them at the 20th character. Oh, and while they’re at it, they might as well add a bit of customizability to their background graphics. That blue gradient is a bit too “Windows 95″ for my tastes. (OK, that’s a lie. Windows 95’s blue gradient started at #0000cc. This one is more of a #ccccff.)
On the “Cool Extras” side of things, we have the H320’s ability to act as a USB 1.1 host (allowing it to pull files directly from digital cameras, PDAs or other music players), an FM Radio (which you can even record in real-time), a built-in microphone (with voice-activated recording), line in/out ports, an external battery pack (more on this one later), an image/text viewer and two fistfuls of cable.
The external battery pack is a sincere but ultimately … well, crappy, attempt at extending the H320’s battery life without actually making its Lithium-Polymer battery removable (the way many other portables are doing). Since it requires 4 AA’s, it adds so much weight and bulk that the H320 doesn’t feel all that portable anymore. I’m actually unsure how you’re supposed to carry the player around with the battery pack attached, to be honest. It’s too big for your pocket and it doesn’t have a clip for your belt, so you’re basically stuck with keeping it in your bag (which is probably a good idea since there is some serious un-cool-ness to this battery pack that makes me want to hide it away from public view).
All of those other little nitpicks aside though, I think the main issue with the H320 is its usability. It’s sort of an interesting split between “easy as pie” and “Jesus, please help me,” and as most gadget buffs know, when you can’t understand how to make something work, Jesus usually doesn’t help you, and neither does the manual.
Good stuff first: Windows recognized it immediately as an external hard drive when I plugged it into my USB port, so I didn’t have to install any software. I just dragged my entire music folder onto its drive icon, and sat back. 12 gigs took a little less than an hour to copy, which was a lot shorter than I was expecting, but will only work if your computer has USB 2.0 ports. (At USB 1.0, it’d take … hell, I’m almost scared to guess here … maybe 6 hours?)
As soon as the files were loaded and the player itself had been adequately charged (full charge takes about 3 hours), playing music was as easy as pressing the PLAY button. The PREVIOUS and NEXT buttons function as you would expect them to, namely, pressing them loads the next track, and holding them will move the playhead forwards or backwards within the current track.
Well, that all seems easy enough. Now, how do I use the FM radio?
Unfortunately, the ease-of-use ends where the “Cool Extras” begin. I had to keep referring to the manual to figure out certain functions, like activating the aforementioned FM radio (hold the Record button while in Playback mode) or turning on the Shuffle mode (press the Record button several times to cycle through the different modes).
The center (literally) of the iRiver user-interface is the blue NAVI button, which has different functions depending on whether you press it or hold it, and your position within the menu-system. It’s actually similar to the Nokia’s Menu key on some of its phones. What confounded me about iRiver’s implementation was that apparently, some of the other buttons had this function-morphing mojo as well, but only during specific times.
For example, you can use the A->B button (and may I just say that iRiver could not have picked a more ambiguous button label if they had thrown darts at a wall of printed Linux source) to queue up the next song you want to listen to, but only during playback and only when you’re in the File Tree view. Otherwise, it functions as an Equalizer switch, unless, that is, you happen to be listening to the radio, in which case it will store the current frequency in memory. You can also use it to create a looping segment in the current song you’re listening to (if you wanted to hear a certain portion repeatedly), but it looked so complicated my eyes wouldn’t read it.
I guess if you take a step back and look at how the whole menu system is organized, you’ll see a certain logic to everything, but there are too many dead-ends and complete turnarounds to be very intuitive. I know that most companies these days encourage users to read the guides thoroughly before using their products, but should it really be this difficult to use a digital jukebox? Or its cool extras, for that matter?
I’ve never used an iPod, but I can’t imagine its learning curve being higher than the H320’s. On the other hand, after a few days (or in my case, weeks) of regular use, all learning curves tend to flatten themselves out pretty evenly, so I guess this’ll all be moot by Monday.
Some other minor quibbles, here and there:
For some reason, connecting the player to your computer stops playback. I’m not sure why, and I haven’t found a way around it as of yet. Are they worried that you might delete a file that was currently playing, and like, force a self-destruct sequence or something? Annoying.
This device is pretty heavy too, all things considered. It’s almost as heavy as my Nikon Coolpix 4300, which, being a camera, is totally unrelated to this review and totally irrelevant as a point of comparison. But, it’s pretty close weight-wise, and it’s not like I could say it was as heavy as my UPS. It will just barely fit in your pocket without being bothersome, and only if you’re wearing loose pants.
Also, after the 2000-song mark, the H320 becomes noticeably sluggish, taking almost a full minute before it’s ready to start playing music. The slowdown is actually related to the ID3 database that it has to read every time it starts up, so the unit comes with this feature turned off by default. If you’re not very persnickety about collating and organizing your MP3 collection, you will almost certainly need to have this database feature on, but I’ve found that having a Letter->Artist->Album folder hierarchy can replace the db in most cases. (I knew there was a reason why I hand-typed those 700 artist-name folders two months ago!)
To be fair, once the database had been properly loaded, response time was pretty snappy, whether I was pressing Next repeatedly while on Shuffle mode, or just holding down the Scroll button.
Overall, I’m very happy with the H320; I know I sound like I’m not, but I am. Honest. The one thing it needed to do — i.e., encourage my latent autism by letting me shut out the external world for 12 hours each day — it does very well, and ultimately, that’s what matters.
Although I admittedly have little experience with other players, I’d say that this device addresses all of my music needs pretty handily, and manages to throw in enough extras to warrant its higher price tag: US-based vendors have been pegging it somewhere between US$300 and US$350, although obviously, YMMV, here more than anywhere else. Other interesting non-iPod choices include Creative’s Zen Touch (the one with the touchpad instead of a click-wheel) and the tiny Rio Karma, although neither have color screens.
I’ve been using the player for about a week now, and I have yet to encounter any real screwups or bugs (I’m still using the factory-installed firmware, although a patch is already available at iRiver.com), and apart from the unnecessarily complex UI, I don’t have any major complaints.
Warning: Unsolicited Advice from Amateur Developer Ahead.
Now, if I was to fix their UI, I’d probably just add one or two buttons instead of forcing the menu-system to conform to the handful of buttons that are currently present. A dedicated hardware button for choosing between Music, Radio, Image or Text modes would be extremely helpful for example, not to mention go a long way toward making the device useable straight out of the box. I think that alone would have prevented a lot of my initial confusion, and may have even restored my faith in Jesus to boot.