I think I must see every third person down the street these days with a boldly white set of ear buds from an iPod screaming “mug me”. I haven’t had much experience with Apple products, but in that short time of space I found them irritating and frustrating to use, from G4’s through to iPods. IPods I haven’t had my hands on, and never particularly wanted to as all I ever heard were problems with them. They seemed too sensitive for a piece of transportable hardware.
I went hunting for a decent sized mp3 player and got suggestions for Creative and iPods. Creative look good, but wasn’t completely after what I wanted. IPods I left clear because as I said, all I hear are people having problems with the iPod itself or the software that runs with it. So I pretty much put down “no iPods” when I went looking for some kind of portable device.
I’ve been using walkmans, Discmans, mp3 players for a long time. I remember having my walkman back in high school and having that on me pretty much every day and listening to something. I’ve got a Sony one which is still soldering on 10 years later and never had a problem with it, and has some features in the Discman that I’ve wanted in an mp3 player.
The iRiver X20 was shown to me and I had a read of it on Minidisc.com.au and was impressed with what I got for its price. I got the 8gb model, with support for Micro SD cards which I wanted and will explain about later on in this article.
I’ve currently been using my Sony Ericsson K750I phone with a 1 gigabyte memory stick in it to store my music on, and some adapters from the port on the phone to my ear buds to plug in. These adapters cost me a dollar each from Hong Kong, they lasted 6 months but then both broke within a week or so of the first one breaking. So I set out for some opinions of what was on the market in mp3 players in the $200-$300 range that wasn’t made by Apple!
I was after an mp3 player with the following:
- $200 range. If I couldn’t find anything I’d get a 60gb Toshiba Gigabeat for $350 off eBay.
- It’d have to be either hard drive based with 6gb or more, or flash based storage with either SD or XD card slot that supports minimum 4gb cards.
- Customisable equaliser
- Rechargeable battery
- and lastly something that wasn’t an iPod, I wanted something reliable and wouldn’t cause me hassles later down the track.
My first impression on the iRiver X20 is well… I like it and it’s a well worthy investment for an mp3 player. I have 8gb of space which I paid $250 (AU) for which I compared to an iPod Nano which is $400 (AU) for 4gb of space. Sounds like I got the better deal, not only that but I also get to play video on mine.
From a practical point of view there are a few things that have bugged me since I bought the iRiver. The iRiver comes with a hold button that gets some use, when it’s in my pocket the Play/Pause button is pretty sensitive and tends to stop the music if you bump against something. There is a small graphic equalizer but if you like a decent amount of bass then this player isn’t for you, it’s pretty lacking in that department. With the presets or a custom EQ the bass distorts if its turned to high, I remember when I had my Sony Discman they had a button for “MegaBass” and this really cranked it up to what you’d expect, a much fuller sound. The iRiver ear buds that come with it are rubbish, but then most players that have earbuds with them are. But that’s considering I spend most of my time with a $200 pair of Beyerdynamics on my head and everything sounds sweet through them.
Navigating the menu is hard at first and takes some getting used to, but once you do you realize that there’s no stop button. You exit out of the player and you want to stop and you can’t. Quite irritating! Also, if you’ve got 8gb of mp3s on your player you sure has hell don’t want to scroll through a few thousand to get to where you were last. It does have a track search where you hold down a button and fast forwards through the track or lengthy DJ set you might have in there.
Onto the video, I’m well impressed. The screen is vibrant and easy to watch movies on there, I loaded an episode of Family Guy and it looked great and sounded great. Conversion on video does take a while though, and some codecs on movies will cause problems converting. So long as you remember to go through the settings on the video conversion you should be fine in getting on there to watch.
I wanted a player with the removable flash disk for a reason, I have myself a new Acer laptop with an internal card reader. Now I keep a lot of important work on there I can lose, so I keep a Micro SD card in the card reader slot and have my back up tool running that does and auto back up when I ask it to or on a timer. Then I can keep this in my player so I have a copy in 2 places at all times and not lose the Micro SD because they are so small. That’s my practical use on the player and why I wanted flash with a card slot in it. Also there is the added option of being able to expand the space to 10gb total if you want more music.
