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iRiver H320 (Almost) Hits The Market

Posted by timothy on from the looks-sweet dept.

skyshock21 writes "iRiver appears to now be taking pre-orders for their H320 hard drive MP3 player. This is the one with the color screen that was featured on Slashdot a while back. Although it doesn't support .flac files like the Rio Karma, it does support .ogg, in addition to the usual file formats (mp3, .wmv, .asf, .wav) and sports a nifty color screen. There is also a review posted on CNET."

12 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. Battery life? by NETHED · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I for one, don't want a color screen. I want a battery that lasts me a month. I'll deal with a small, effective, elegant monochrome screen.

    Just my two bits.

    --
    --sig fault--
    1. Re:Battery life? by RazzleFrog · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You know I thought the same thing about cell phones until I got my Samsung. The color screen is much easier to read in bright sunlight as well as pitch black night. The battery life obviously suffers but I have a charger at work and at home.

      The iRiver says it has a 16 hour life so figure 10-12 hours realistically. Unless you are flying half-way across the globe I think that should get you to and from work.

    2. Re:Battery life? by dasmegabyte · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Right, and the old 3G iPod can get the same gains with the higher capacity aftermarket batteries that came out. I bought one for $25, I get about 10 hours of life out of it now.

      The iPod's "dismal battery life" was a result of its form factor. Apple used the smallest battery they could to get a minimum of 8 hours playback, so you could listen all day at work. Now that there are millions of uses for batteries that size, many battery manufacturers are creating higher capacity flat batteries that are also mega cheap. Blaming Apple for using the best battery on the market at the time is kind of stupid.

      Incidentally, I will not be replacing my iPod with an iRiver any time soon, because while the colour screen is really cool, the device looks pretty large, has WAY too many click tactile buttons to break and ports that will fill with lint, the visual interface looks pretty dull (reminds me of KDE, ew) and the human interface poorly laid out. It is hard to use tiny little buttons while on the go...that's why the iPod has a huge fucking wheel (and why mine has large, inset, finger sized buttons). Why does everybody else insist on making tiny little buttons and putting them right next to each other? Aesthetics? Who sees the thing when it's in your coat pocket? If you NEED to make some small buttons, at least space them more than a thumb's width apart, so you don't press all of them at once. GOD, why is Apple the only company who can engineer a fucking device that doesn't feel like some sadistic toy?

      --
      Hey freaks: now you're ju
  2. Firmware by The_Real_Nire · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hopefully now that this is about done for the US, they will get their act together and concentrate on the firmware updates for the rest of us, instead of ignoring existing customers.

    1. Re:Firmware by justforaday · · Score: 4, Insightful

      now why would they do that? they already have your money...

      /cynical bastard

      --
      I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
  3. Fine print... by RenHoek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1GB equals 1,000,000,000 bytes, not all memory space available for file storage.

    Euhm, so.... how much space DO we have left? Could be anything really.. Damn marketing speak!

    1. Re:Fine print... by twbecker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Is that really a suprise? Pretty much ALL manufacturers use 1 million MB to mean a GB now. My 20GB iPod only has 18.5GB of usable space on it. You'd think they would stop this practice, considering how many "My new x GB hard drive is busted! It only has x-y GB of space!" support calls they get.

      --
      "The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
  4. Um. by eddy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Although it doesn't support .flac files like the Rio Karma, it does support .ogg,

    That's pretty close to a contradiction since we have both Ogg FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. You meant to say it supports Vorbis? Or is it just plain FLAC files it doesn't support, but Ogg FLAC is fine?

    --
    Belief is the currency of delusion.
    1. Re:Um. by hackstraw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A little offtopic, but a rant that I want to express.

      I'm getting sick of the whole container/codec thing. Noone knows whats inside of a .mov, .wmv, .ogg, etc file. I know whats in a .mp3, .wav, .aac or whatever. I have a Mac with the latest Windows Media Player and it will not play all .wmv files. There is no way that I can tell from a filename that I can even view the file after it downloads.

      Every time /. posts an article about a portable music player there is the "Does it play flac and/or ogg?" And then people bring up the specific codecs inside of the .ogg file. If us technoweenies can't get it straight, how can anybody?

      Am I the only one that has issues with these multimedia containers?

  5. Semantics, semantics... by irokitt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Almost hits the market" is like "almost pregnant". Doesn't count. After all, Duke Nukem Forever has been "almost released" for about six years.

    --
    If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
  6. Whatever happened to. . . by twbecker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    doing one thing, and doing it well? How many people seriously want to carry digital photos around wherever they go? I just don't get the color screen. I guess it's for the same people that like having a camera in their cell phone. True, the thing has an FM tuner and can record voice and radio. That's good, but it's also bulky, has a relatively poor interface and is $30 more expensive than an iPod, which /.ers already bash for being too pricey. Here's an idea: instead of giving us more bloat, why don't they just make the ultimate music player. One that will playback ALL major formats, has a good interface, and super long battery life. Although my iPod is great, it fails to meet 2 of these criteria. I guess we'll have to keep waiting. ..

    --
    "The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
  7. Re:The beauty of the iPod... by tfoss · · Score: 4, Insightful
    iPod isn't number 1 because it is the best player -- it's clearly not -- not in battery life, choice of format, syncing, or price -- but because the marketing budget on that device is bigger than all the other devices combined.

    I'm not sure you can say it's clearly not the best player, for the simple fact that best player means completely different things to different people. Just to illustrate that, which player is clearly the best?

    To trot out the same old pony of ipod arguments, it's the complete package that makes it so appealing. Sure you can find one's that are smaller, cheaper, higher storage, possess more features, have decent design, better battery life, etc etc....but I have yet to see one that puts all of them together as well as an ipod. Apple certainly chose to make sacrifices in its design, but IMHO they chose the (so far) best set of choices.

    As for the itunes/ipod lockin (aside from the fact that itunes seems pretty well designed, especially for someone espousing WMP10), ipods do *not* only work with itunes. You can get various third-party apps that sync (j river media center, ephpod, xplay) to it. You are only locked into itunes music store if your other store doesn't allow CD burning, or if you don't count real's whole helix situation.

    -Ted

    --
    -=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.