iRiver S10 Review

Well, rather than posting random cr@p off the net I thought I'd do something more constructive and review the iriver S10 player that appeared magically yesterday.

First impressions: This thing is tiny! Literally about the size of a stamp with a full colour screen that enables you to click a direction to select songs etc. (No bodgy ipod shuffle lack of interface where you can't do anything). The screen is easy to read and the unit is very responsive. Sound quality it excellent. The only gripes I had are the extremely short headphone cord length and the included software.

In a bit more detail
Connectivity:
I think one of the biggest pluses in any mp3 player is not to be forced to use some proprietary software. In iriver's case they have a tradition of allowing their players to be used as usb drives. This is one huge plus and enables you to just drag and drop any files, music, pictures and stuff you like directly onto the player. Put music directly into the music directory and the player will find it and be able to play it. This aspect of the S10 works extremely well. The mini usb connector/adapter is cool but probably would be a nightmare to replace if you lost it. Its also tiny so be careful.

User interface:
The player itself feels well made and the user interface is reasonably intuitive. I had a brief glimpse through the manual and was soon able to work out all the controls. There is a clock (with alarm), picture viewer and fm radio all of which are easily found. Settings for the s10 are easily understood and even a novice mp3 user should be able to get the thing fired up.

Sound quality:
Like other iriver players I have used the sound quality is excellent and reasonably customisable. There is a bunch of settings for controlling the SRSwow (random sound processing stuff) and additional bass etc can be quickly added in. This thing sounds good out of the box and a bit of customisation is enough to make anyone happy.

Software:
The included iriverPlus3 software is pretty poor. It took forever to scan the music that was on my external drive and crashed once before working. I tried playing an mp3 directly through the software and it got stuck halfway through so I think there are quite a few issues. I also tried updating the firmware of the player and it kept telling me the network was unavailable. I guess this is one of the reasons that I thought the direct windows explorer functionality was so important because proprietary software usually sucks. The software did manage to update itself and if you had a small amount of music it probably would work reasonably well.

Battery life:
It's always disappointing to have a proprietary battery in a player because when the battery dies there is no way to replace it. If you want to travel with the unit you'll either need to take a laptop to charge it or buy a universal usb charger. The claimed battery life of the S10 is around 8 hours and I haven't tested it fully yet. Charging takes 1.5 hours for a full charge and about an hour will get 80% charging. Seems pretty reasonable for the size of the unit.

Recording:
There is a microphone for recording and you can directly record fm radio. These are both semi-useful but not essential features. It appeared that when recording you can only record to WMA files but more fiddling will have to confirm this. There is no line in so you can't record directly from another source but in a player this size you wouldn't expect it.

Overall: 8/10
Ignore the inbuilt software and use explorer its really an excellent little player. Tiny size, good sound, colour screen and nifty user interface. A shiteload more features than a shuffle which appears to be the only real competition in the tiny, tiny mp3 market and up to 2gb storage make this a pretty useful music machine. Cool style, excellent screen and big sound are a huge bonus in this little postage stamp.

Minor gripe: Oh yeah, they expect you to use the headphones in a lanyard style with the unit hanging round your neck. All well and good if you want to do that but useless if you want to have the unit in your pocket or somewhere else the headphone cord is just too short. So you might have to use other headphones.