Brian's Brain

Continued from Player Opinions....

iRiver H10

Pros:
1) Beautiful color screen; the H10 not only handles audio, it also supports the display of JPEG photos.
2) Reasonably intuitive user interface, although not as solid as that in the Zen Micro.
3) Small and lightweight, and comes in four colors (mine is muted red, more professional-looking in my opinion than the comparatively garish Zen Micro, although I bet I know which one a teenager would prefer!).
4) Excellent sound quality (much better than in previous firmware revisions, I've been told). More than sufficient volume capability.
5) 5 GByte capacity holds a lot of music, even encoded at 192 kbps.
6) A large number of audio processing options, including SRS Labs' Wow algorithm (with user-customizable parameters).
7) Microphone recording and FM radio (including recording) functions, neither of which I've tried out. Also supports line in recording via the separate dock, which I didn't have on-hand to try.
8) Downloads over the USB2 interface are quite speedy; a minute or so per album, and the H10 also charges over the USB2 connection.
9) Touchpad controls had acceptable sensitivity (which is good, because they're non-adjustable), although I missed the tap-to-select approach of the Zen Micro (the H10 has a separate 'select' button).
10) No software driver installation required prior to use.

Cons:
1) Battery life, at around 9 hours, was less than the 12 hours claimed. Again, incremental audio enhancement and DRM processing algorithms, not required in all cases, may account for the discrepency.
2) If I let tracks play through to the end, the track-to-track switching time was anywhere from 30-60 seconds on DRM'd material, albeit nearly instantaneous on non-DRM'd material. iRiver and Microsoft are aware of the problem, although timeframe for resolution is not announced at this point.
3) I saved the worst for last. If I try to manually advance to the next track or back-step to the previous track, the system freezes for several minutes per track jump. Clearly unacceptable.

Yeah, there are annoying glitches and other nitpicks in this first iteration of the concept. But don't let them distract you from the overwhelmingly positive potential of the subscription service approach. If I were working at One Infinite Loop (Apple HQ, in Cupertino, CA) right now, I'd be figuring out how to fire up my own subscription service. Pronto.