iriver U10 (512MB)

Already well-known for the quality of its products, Reigncom's iRiver brand of flash-based MP3 players have always been priced at the premium end of the market. Yet Apple's aggressive foray into the flash MP3 player market with the iPod nano at its vanguard may just erode iRiver's share of the market. Read on as we test drive the Korean company's latest response to the iPod threat.

Design
Forget both the Creative Zen Micro's Touch Scroll and iRiver H10's touch strip; the Click Wheel may be the design epitome for an MP3 player interface, but the U10's Direct-Click (D-Click) system comes a close second in our opinion. For us, tactile feedback is an important attribute for most electronic products: Just imagine typing on a keyboard that is as flat and as hard as a basalt plateau and see how far you go.

	Clicking that pad.

Previous efforts to mimic the Click Wheel's intuitiveness without running into a spat with Apple's legal eagles, like Sony's G-Sensor and Toshiba's Plus Touch controller, failed to capture the consumer imagination quite as well as the iPod's own. Yet this reviewer's first experience with the iRiver U10 felt almost akin to the first time he held an iPod mini--uber simplicity at last.

Using the display as the basis of control is an innovative move on iRiver's part. Rather than a touch screen as suspected earlier by some pundits, the U10 instead marrys the quad-directional rocker switch (inherent in its earlier flash-based units) with a QVGA screen to create an illusion of a floating screen. With four clickable sides, the U10 follows an organic layout using arrows and onscreen instructions to indicate the area to be depressed.

	Is the Zen out of touch?.

As a general rule of thumb, right clicks will lead the user deeper into the menu while left ones bring one up a menu layer. Up and down clicks also serve to navigate within the menu layer and holding down the right side will produce a sub-menu relevant to the particular function in current operation, e.g. equalizer settings during MP3 playback. Do note that with so much finger pressing, the plastic screen of the U10 is bound to be a magnet for fingerprint smudges.

Other than the D-Click, controls are kept to a minimal with two volume buttons, a power on/off, hold switch and a display orientation key for those insistent on a portrait perspective.

	Slick and slim.

Measuring 69 x 47 x 16mm and weighing 70g, the U10 also stands apart from previous iRiver designs in that it has a relatively generous 2.2-inch screen which is a far cry from the 1.5 incher in iRiver's flagship Microdrive player, the H10, which couldn't even play video. Movies on the U10 are brilliantly rendered and proved to be one of the sharpest we have seen for such a screen size caliber.

Done up in a tasteful black and white, the U10 comes with a small carrier pouch that has a small display wiper attached. Do note that the wiper comes in real handy for clearing up those aforementioned fingerprint smudges.

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