|
iriver E100 MP3 Player
Testing
Navigation After giving the E100 a good charge for a couple hours, I fired it up for my first fiddling session. Hold down the power button and after a second the iriver logo comes to life on the glossy black LCD. About 10 seconds later you are greeted with a menu screen. The boot up time is a bit long, but not much different from my Sansa E200 or other players I've tested. A horizontally scrolling icon-based menu system guides you through Music, Videos, Pictures, Texts, FM Radio, Recordings, File Manager and Settings selections. The screen is bright and crisp although it suffers from a viewing angle problem. In fact I found that the player needed to be tilted back slightly to get the best images. It also needs to be placed on the highest brightness setting for effective daylight viewing. The second strike against the player is tallied by the D-pad. I often found myself having to press buttons more than once to access the next menu screen despite a clear and audible click from the D-pad. The menu screens are also laggy as it takes about half a second from the time the button is pressed until the next menu appears...a clearly perceptible pause (a firmware update did nothing to remedy this ailment). And for strike three: the menu interface isn't quite as straight-forward at previous iriver iterations. During music playback the FFWD and REW functions are controlled by the bottom and top D-pad buttons respectively with the left click taking you back one menu screen and the right button acting as a music loop setting! While there may be time when I need to create 5 or 10 second loops of music files, I don't think it needs to be a readily accessible feature. Pressing and holding the right D-pad button will take you to a useful settings screen where you can adjust sound and repeat/play settings as well as delete files, a handy feature several players don't include. Additionally the traditional Album/Artist file tree is slightly askew in that when an artist is selected individual albums aren't displayed. Rather all of the collective songs are filed under the artist's name. To select a specific album you must use the Album menu. However, selecting the confusingly titled Dir List menu will get you to the standard Artist/Album/Song format. That's three strikes right off the bat but luckily the E100 isn't quite out. Music Playback The included ear buds are surprisingly proficient at pumping out the tunes. I will overlook their iPod white color. Considering the $99 price point, I'd have to say that the E100 is one of the best sounding players I've heard for the money. On average most of my MP3s are encoded at a VBR 160-320 kbps and all the music I ran through the ear buds had a nice range with reasonable bass response, as much bass is allowed by ear bud. If you are a codec geek the E100 will also handle WMA, OGG, ASF and FLAC files as well. Lending even better sound quality to the budget player is the array of digital equalizer settings, including a custom EQ, and the 5 different iriver-specific sound settings found under the "SRS WOW HD" menu under the Setup Sound menu (press and hold the right D-pad button during music playback to access this menu). Under the SRS WOW HD menu you will find the SRS, TruBass, FOCUS, WOW and Definition settings. Each of these have a setting range from 1-10, except for the WOW menu which only goes to 7. I guess you can only have 7 WOW...10 is beyond what your mortal ears can handle. What does each of these settings do? Well besides oozing marketing babble they are little more than bass boost and mid range adjustments. Personally I found the custom EQ was my favorite way to fine tune sound quality. Pop the ear buds out of the player and you'll be surprised to hear your favorite music still playing, although at a greatly reduced quality. A pair of onboard speakers allows users to share tunes with friends and neighbors. But their usefulness is limited to quick demo sessions as few people would choose to listen exclusively to these weak, wheezing tweeters. Their quality can be compared to the average cell phone MP3 ring tone. But the E100 does have the distinction of being able to play songs externally, unlike most other PMPs. Iriver claims a 24 hour battery life for audio playback. My own intense testing (which consisted of me turning on repeat and setting the volume to 20 (out of 40) and going to sleep) confirms their estimates. I logged just around 24 hours before the player shut down. During my normal weekly use I didn't have need to fully recharge for about 7 days while using the player 3-4 hours a day. Although I did have several session of uploading that occurred during which time the player did receive a few quick charges. Software Shunting music files from your computer to the E100 should pose no problems. Windows XP and Vista users can treat the player as a removable hard drive as the E100 is natively recognized. From there it is a simple matter of dragging and dropping files into the Music folder located on the E100. Alternatively, if you are a glutton for punishment, you can use Windows Media Player 11 to sync your music files to the player. I've always found WMP as poor music syncing utility. Thankfully iriver also includes a version of their music syncing, ripping and organizing software called iriver plus 3. Plus 3 isn't packed chock-a-block with as many features as iTunes, but it runs smoothly, is a simply designed interface and easy to use. The plus 3 software will automatically search for your music files or you can aim it towards your file cache. Plus 3 also handles transferring photos, videos and text documents. If iriver could figure out a way to include podcast support, they'd really be onto something.
Page 1: Introduction & First Looks
Page 2: Testing - Navigation, Music Playback & Software Page 3: Testing - Video, Pictures, Text, Recording & FM Radio Page 4: Conclusion 
Related Reviews Portable Media Players July 16, 2009
Portable Media Players September 24, 2008
Portable Media Players July 23, 2007
Add Comment
2 User Comments 1 - Posted by
sci_fianime
on August 6, 2008 - 1:32 am Love the review - puts into words the experience I have with my black E100... However, I do find the video viewing angle range very limited, they look washed out once you are slightly off... Otherwise, I am very happy with the feature set which cannot be found in any other player around the same price range.... 2 - Posted by
SixString
on April 23, 2009 - 2:34 am I just got the iRiver and I'm VERY impressed. You *can* manually tune the FM stations, contrary to this review, tho' it's not real intuitive. In FM mode, pressing the Select button toggles between Preset and Manual modes. Thus, you can manually tune and set the presets however you like them.
Add Comment To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields. |
Recent Articles Editorials August 27, 2009
Editorials August 18, 2009
Editorials March 3, 2009
Editorials February 12, 2009
Recent News VICE Nov. 20, 2009 - 7:17 pm
Wired Nov. 20, 2009 - 7:07 pm
Engadget Nov. 20, 2009 - 6:58 pm
Telegraph.co.uk Nov. 20, 2009 - 6:48 pm
BBC Nov. 20, 2009 - 6:38 pm
Destructoid Nov. 18, 2009 - 11:55 pm
Wired Nov. 16, 2009 - 11:56 pm
Ultimate Typing Championship Nov. 16, 2009 - 11:42 pm
|
|||||||||||||||
