I purchased this product from Amazon after a long wait. My friends had
hyped up so much about the sound quality et al of iRiver that I choose
to wait for about a month, checking online everyday for this product to
become available. Here goes my small and distasteful experience with
this product.
I
ordered it on 2nd of Feb and amazon said it would be delivered by 15th
- 17th. Firstly Amazon never takes that long. I have bought products worth$3000 to$4000 and always it has been delivered earlier than the expected date. This product was the only exception in both the timing of delivery as well as the quality. Anyways, it landed on my place on 17th, and since I had been
waiting for this product for so long, it already raised my expectations
a lot.
When I opened the package and copied songs on the player
with some difficulty(Mind it, the documentation is in a lot of
languages but quality is horrible) the quality of sound or the output
was no way better than an IPod. In-fact, on the default output
settings, the music player on my Krazr on a speakerphone beats this
player hands down. This is not an exaggaration as there are a few songs
that I have, and there are sounds in those songs that were audible on
Krazr but not on iRiver even though I tried all the presets. Those
sounds do exist as I can hear them in my PC on winamp. The SRS WOW settings help though. I used it for half an hour and realized
that the build quality was shoddy.
For the
earphones, when I increased the volume, the sound leaked a lot from the
earphones and enabling SRS WOW() on the player introduced a hiss.
Frankly speaking, I was so disappointed with the quality that next weekend, I went out and bought Sandisk Sansa e280.
Then
something good happened finally with iRiver, I have a pair of about 12
year old earphones from my Aiwa walkman and used them instead of the
original earphones of iRiver. The difference in quality was huge and
there wasn’t any leakage. All iRiver has to do to make this product
better is to give a better pair of earphones.
Well, they say
good things don’t last for long. Exactly one month after the purchase
(28 days to be precise as it was Feb), clix stopped working totally. It wouldn’t even
start. I reset it but of no use. Next day, it turned on for a second
and showed low battery and turned off. I tried charging it but of no
use. According to iRiver, I had charged it with a high voltage than
specified and the product was fine though I had been using the same USB
port for charging my MotoRazr, Moto Krazr and now Sandisk Sansa for
over a year in totaly and no other product had any issues. In-fact two months ago, I went out to buy two more MP3 players of the Sansa family.
My
cousin is an electronics engineer and I asked him to see if he can do
something of my Clix. He opened it and confirmed that the charging unit
was short. There was no name on the IC so I cannot buy a new one from
market and replace it.
There was one more shocking observation
though, the MP3 processing unit on this product is a Samsung chip. Any
thoughts on why a Samsung MP3 player will not give the same quality of
output as compared to iRiver Clix.
Lastly, just a
recommendation. Dont burn your money on this product, there are enough
good products out there. If you like the look and feel of this product, go and buy Cowon products. If you are looking for good sound quality, buy an Ipod or Sansa.