Photos: Hands-on with the iriver P20

We didn't bother writing about iriver's latest Cowon/Archos-killing PMP--the P20--at CES back in January, because the company only had a non-working model on show.

For IFA this year, however, iriver brought a fully functioning P20 to Berlin for intrepid tech journalists to poke opinions at.

For those not aware, this is an 80GB or 120GB portable video player, featuring physical wheels a la iriver Spinn, a massive 480 x 272-pixel AMOLED touch-sensitive display, support for MP3 (or "Em Pee Drei" as so many German booth ladies kept putting it), WMA, OGG, FLAC, APE and WAV music, XviD, DivX, MPEG-4 H.264 and WMV video, Microsoft Office documents and Adobe Flash Lite 3.0.

Within a few minutes of playing, we formed a love-hate relationship with the P20--love the great specs, hate the clunky navigation. One physical wheel on the right-hand side selects the player's function (there's no main menu screen), while the other cycles a given function's menu items. Then a separate "OK" button is required for item selection, and a separate "back" button for plodding back through menus.

The screen is impressive, though, in terms of sharpness and color reproduction, and with such a great set of supported codecs and a 9-hour battery life for video, the P20 is looking like a killer portable movie device.

There was just something that wasn't ticking all the boxes for us, though, and we're convinced it was solely the result of the chunky device's interface and navigation.

But it still looks to be a fair alternative to Cowon's A3 or Q5, or the Archos 605 WiFi, when it's eventually released. Prices are to be confirmed, but iriver loosely suggested around £300 (US$538) when we pestered.

We'll have our extensive hands-on and review for you as soon as we possibly can. For now, click through for a couple of extra photos.