UPDATE 7/26/06 -- I dropped the rating to three as of more reseting and formatting.

*Note that this is a part two of an older review--I'm re-writing it to include more information and to explain different problems and different features I've found out.

Before I had even bought this player, I really didn't want an iPod. For one, at the time, I didn't have my library uploaded to iTunes. Secondly, [at the time] the iRiver had more features like a radio, radio recorder, voice recorder, and photo viewer. Plus, the iPod was a little less valued than the iRiver. At the time (exactly a year ago) this was the HOTTEST MP3 player on the market. It took me literally two weeks to reserve one and have it mail to me (from somewhere as big as Best Buy). Pretty similar to how iPod videos are right now. Well, since the iRiver was a better deal, I paid about $300 for it and could only be happier if it had video, used iTunes, and I didn't have to reset it all the time. But don't get me wrong, this isn't a bad player, it's actually a really good player. The sound quality is good, the color screen is appealing, the tuner features are awesome, and the photo viewing, while not ideal, is really a cool feature.

iRiver H10 20 GB Player
The iRiver H10 is actually a series of players but the 20 GB version is only a little more different than the smaller capacity players because of a bigger screen and an unreplaceable battery. They come in so many colors that I think my head spun. Last time I checked it was red, blue, gray, and silver, but who knows by now. It's fully compatable with .mp3 and .wma files and while it doesn't say so, works fine with .wav files. The screen is a whopping 1.8" and a whopping 20 GB hard drive which is probably more than enough for even the biggest music fans. It's compatable with .jpg images and the images look really sharp on the screen. It is also compatable with .txt files (like in Notepad) in which you can store text, which I guess could be anything (lyrics, stories, jokes, whatever). It has a decent battery life with a full 16 hours but this is probably with only bare-bones settings.

Looks & Design
The iRiver H10 is better than the iPod in some cases and not as good as the iRiver in other cases.

First thing is navigation. The iRiver has an up and down keypad, similar to the Toshiba Gigabeat. I'd rather have the iPod's circle navigation since it goes a bit faster. You can hold the buttons but this does seem to go a bit slower. When you turn on the unit you can go to music, FM tuner, voice recorder, photos, text, browser, or settings. When you go to music its seperated by artists, albums, genres. titles, and playlists. The best function is artists but it depends. Chances are you have a few collabratons in your collection. If you listed them with slashes (/) or commas (,) get ready for some heavy duty scrolling because the player only seperates artists when they're semi colons (;). The albums section is nicely organized but if you often just get singles from an online downloading service (iTunes, Walmart, Musicmatch, P2P, whatever), chances are you'll have a large amount of album selections which could also have you in for some large scrolling. One thing that really sucks is if you own a lot of complications. Unless you make a playlist for it you won't be able to get them to pay in order. If you labeled the songs with their complication name and you own that album (example you bought Complication1 with Artist1 and you bought Artist1's album and have matching songs...that'll be a bit messy). I don't normally go by genre [since a majority of them aren't even accurate] but if yours are, then you can choose a genre and it will refine your search. You can go through titles but I only recommend it for those with a 10-song collection. I have about 2,000 songs so it's kind of useless to me.

In my opinion, iPod wins in navigation [which is actually why they're so popular]. iPods seperate collabrations and have a little more organization going on.

Playlists
Playlists. First off, the H10 already has set-up playlists for you to use. The first one is "My Rating" which is a bit useless to me. When you sync your songs it doesn't sync your Windows Media Player ratings and I don't enjoy rating 2,000 songs one by one. Next is "My Favorites" which should be "Most Played" because it'll play the songs you listen to the most. This is okay for about a month but sometimes I change the way I feel about songs. Sometimes when I listen to a certain song enough I'll dislike it. Sometimes when I listen to a song more I'll like it more. Therefore, it may or may not be my favorites. "Recently Played" is what it says, I won't explain that one. One other thing is a "Quick List". You can choose the songs you want on a playlist and it'll be on there. Just go to a song and hold the O button and it'll be added to the quick list. To erase it you can just go to the quick list and click erase all.

Syncing playlists is where things might get a bit shaky. First off, when using Windows Media Player, you first have to go to Sync>Set Up Sync settings and choose which playlists you want to sync and the "All Music" playlist. Then you insert your player and it will sync it. Just remember you don't have to do this everytime you insert the player, only when you want to sync certain playlist. Windows Media Player will continue adding songs as you add them to your playlist. What I do is make an auto playlist with 4 to 5 stars and another auto playlist with 1 to 3 stars and everything works out just fine for me. First thing that sucks is Windows Media Player. Just as a program it sucks. I don't even know why it sucks but it just does. Secondly, the playlist you create on Windows Media Player isn't compatable with iTunes or RealPlayer so if you create a million song playlist you better hope you love Windows Media Player or you'll be starting from scratch again. Aside from Windows Media Player, I'd say playlist creating is similar to iTunes. You create the playlist and sync it.

FM Tuning
The H10 has a built-in radio with it. I do sometimes use it. One thing that you'll find out is that the H10 comes with weird alredy made radio presets. You can easily delete these by going into preset mode and holding the preset button and it'll delete them one by one. To add a preset, hold the preset button when you're not in preset mode. STEREO will show in display when your tuned in.

Overall the reception was pretty decent. Usually the more the wire is extended, the better the reception will actually be.

You can also record from the radio, something I think is a really cool feature. Make sure the record setting is set to high for 128kbps when you go to settings>record>FM setting.

Other Recording
Another thing you can record is your own voice. You can go to recording>voice and you can record what you say into it and it'll save it as an MP3 file. It's pretty decent but of course sounds best on the high setting. Line-out works but you have to order a special line-out cradle recorder from iRiver, therefore I've never tried it yet.

Photo Viewing
The H10 has built-in photo viewing for, well, any pictures really. Just make sure your pictures are saved as a .jpg/jpeg file and you can add them to your iRiver through My Computer>iRiver H10. The screen is 256,000 colors and photos do look pretty darn sharp on it, but I won't say it's the most ideal thing you can do on it.

Text Viewing
You can also view text on it with files with the .txt extension. It works, but it's not ideal. The main problem I have with it is that it cuts of words similar to going like this....

This is an example t
o show you how the H
10 cuts off text lik
e this.

Otherwise, it's a pretty nice thing to have.

The Looks of When You Play a Song
When you play a song, it does look fairly similar to what the iPod looks like. It has a clock to show what time it is, it shows the battery life, the time eclasped, total time, the file extension, and what programs you have running. It also, of course shows the artist and title.

Settings

Equalizer
The H10 comes with a 5-band equalizer to set your style. It comes with a wide selection of presets but let's be honest here, only the headphones or speakers they used to make the presets are the only thing that will make them sound good so you are better off using the custom EQ. Another feature you can use is SRS Wow, which is for SRS 360 files, which I don't own. When I tried to use it on .mp3s it sounded okay but a lot of bass was lost. But overall, the player does sound very good on all of my music using the custom EQ. The included headphones are the MX400s which don't really sound all that good to me [included headphones 90% of the time suck anyway, but then again, my headphones standard are a bit high], but my MDREX51LPs sound fantastic on it.

Sound Settings
First off, you can change how much depth is in the SRS Wow function. You can also change your programs. There's repeat one, repeat all, shuffle, and repeat. You can also choose if you want crossfade on or not.

Other Settings
First off, you have loads of timers. The first one is a power-off timer in which will shut off your player in a certain amount of time. There's a sleep timer if you want to sleep to your music. There's a backlight timer that will shut off the baclkight in a certain amount of time. You can also set alarms but I don't find these very loud. You can also set a certain time for the FM recorder to record something, a big need for those recording something such as radio programs. If you messed something up as far as settings and your not sure how to reverse t you can choose reset all settings. You can change the language for whatever language you wish. There's also A-B repeat, kind of like the television thing. You can have two selections running and you can choose which one you want. There's also scroll speed to speed up your scrolling a bit. You can also change if you want to see tag information or not. (turning it off might just save you 0.00495 seconds of battery life...). You can do an auto preset thing that will add all of the stations that come in to auto preset. For me it didn't work too well and added a lot of stations that didn't work. Aside from what's in the player, it does have a lock button to keep it from turning on in a bag or something.

Annoying Stuff
Windows Media Player because it's annoying. Otherwise, there really isn't anything really annoying except reseting it. Sometimes if you move too fast with it, it will freeze up and have you reset it. Normally this isn't a problem and just press reset but it is a big ordeal when your out with it and it freezes and you have nothing to reset it with, you have to understand, it's those little poke the hole things like in PDAs so you have to use a needle or mechanical pencil to reset the darn thing. Hopefully either 1) iRiver will make their firmware upgrade a bit lighter in size, 2) iRiver's next series will have a bit faster chipset, or 3) iRiver will make a better reset button in the future. I know you could accidentally press the reset button but you won't hold it for five seconds on accident. One other slightly annoying thing is that the charger and USB are stuck together so if you wanna charge it when you take it along on a trip or something you have to bring both or buy an additional charger ($30!...I think that's customer torture, they know you don't want the two stuck together so what do they do, make them pay for the one you do want).

The Battery
The battery on the H10-20GB is just your standard battery. It's not replaceable but I'm sure iRiver would replace it if it ever died. It says to last about 16 hours but that's probably using flat EQ, 50% volume, that kind of thing. With a custom EQ, decent volume setting, and normal MP3s, I'd say I've gotten about 12 hours on it. One good thing about it is the charging process. You in fact can use it when its charging and charging a full battery take an hour at the most. Overall, I think it actually wins over the iPod.

Durability

Despite the fact that the H10 has one of the highest defective rates in the MP3 world right now. Mine seems to crash a lot and I often have to reset it or format it. Kinda annoying. But the durability of the actual player is very good.

Compatability
Here's where some things get pretty good. Some people think because it comes with Windows Media Player that's it's ONLY compatable with it. Well it's also compatable with RealPlayer 10. This means it is compatable with the following

-Windows 98/98 SE
-Windows ME
-Windows NT
-Windows 2000
-Windows XP
-Mac OS 9
-Mac OS X

So, really the only OS I wish it had (even though I don't have it) would be Windows 95 since (in my opinion) it's not much more obsolete than 98/ME (which Microsoft is dropping already). I would use RealPlayer if it wasn't for the fact that I uploaded my music already to WMP.

Upgradeable Too?!
Yup. The H10 is completely firmware upgradeable through this site:

http://www.iriveramerica.com/support/hd/h10_20gb.aspx

The firmware is easy to install and apply. The only thingthat sucks is that it formats the entire player so you have to re-add your music and re-do a majority of your settings, but the updates are mainly worth it. So, if you own one, you should check that site occassionally for certain updates for your player.

Pricing
In July 2005 I paid $300 for it but the price has dropped dramatically mainly because of the video iPod's technology--you have to stimulate your profit somehow. Some stores even have it for as cheap as $150. Even though the price has dropped, I don't recommend it. There are many better players out there. They might not have the amazing features but at least they last.

The Bottom Line
The iRiver H10 is probably an ok choice for people that dislike iPods...as racist to iPods as it sounds, this player is for those people. You hate iPods? This is a decent pick right now. It has fantastic sound, a good screen, tons of features (but no video *sigh*, maybe a firmware upgrade, you listening iRiver?), compatability with a lot of OSs (if you use RealPlayer), and is portable as ever, but it keeps freezing. And a circled navigation would be a bit more interface-friendly (and that goes along with the customer torture USB cable). Overall, the middle of the road choice for the iPod hater.

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Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 299.99
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection