I have used this product for almost 2 years now and had purchased it at a time when the ipod was beginning to pick up sales like crazy. Let me be honest here. I picked up this product because it was black and had a 16 hour battery life.. in that order. Everyone I knew predicted doomsday for this product since day one and all have been surprised by its quality and feature set which to this day can stand against its coloured/videoed relatives. Let me hash out a few of the technical details that at hindsight are design masterstrokes.
One lineout and one optical out means that 2 people can listen to the player simultaneously.
Battery life - I had long suspected that 16 hourts playback was marketing. Now I know better. This thing does last roughly 14-15 hours and 6 if you can go wihtout jumping tracks a lot.
radio, excellent audio recording
Any review of this product is incomplete wihtout a mention about the remote that comes along with this product. The remote is not a cut down version with a few feature to keep you happy.. its in fact a fully feature radio with its own display meant to make you jump around in ecstasy. Reelly Really uselfy when biking and listening to music. The remote means that the main unit can stay in ur back pack while the remote is clipped on to you belt or shirt.
There are lots more to this prduct than meets th eyes.. Yes it does not have video/photos etc but I had bough it to fulfill my music needs and it does this happily by being compliant with ogg/wav/mp3 etc and letting me keep it longer in m pocket than plugged to the wall.
I will be selling it soon to purchase the 320 with usb host features for my trigger happy ways with my camera.. but then thats another story :)//Edited - Friday the 13th Jan 2006 23:38Hrs.
here are few more things that definitely deserve mention that I remembered after posted this.
The iriver should come with a a leather cover that holds it firm and allows easy navigation too, unlike other products where you might need to purchase a cover. I have yet to put a scratch on this thing dashing all hopes of me exchanging this for something new. The body is magneisum alloy which means you will have to treat this baby especially bad to put scratches.
The OSD light is a light-light blue quite unlike the bright white ones on some other players which means that viewing this screen at night or in dark places will not put too much stress on your eyes.
This baby is a simple plug and ready for most of the linux distributions. It should turn up as a USB mass storagte device and a mount away from usage. You should be able to use iripDb to update the database from linux and for some reason this is much faster than the one for windows.
Also Rockbox.org should be out with some open source firmwares that should put more juice into this player soon something that cannot be said baout most other players.
The loveliest sleep times I have seen on any product.. set to swich off after say 20 minutes and then at the 15th minute you decide to navigate to some other song, then the player will reset the sleep timer sensing the fact that you are awake and would not be sleeping in another 5 minutes, saving the hassle of the device going asleep before you do.6. Learning mode which can be set to forward the music by n seconds or minutes, for people who are trying to learn a new song.