Design
To the right of the screen is a five-way control pad surrounded by an ultrathin mechanical scroll wheel (á la the SanDisk Sansa e200 series). As with the e200 series, the X20's scroll ring lights up blue when activated. It's also on the too-thin side, making it a little hard to use, but it has some raised bumps that help provide traction. Inside the ring is a white control pad (up, down, left, and right) surrounding a play/pause key. A power button resides below the control pad and there's a menu key above it.
The face of the X20 also features a pinhole mic for making voice recordings, and the right side offers a line-in port for that style of recording as well. For line-in, you can choose from low-, medium-, and high-quality settings, and files are saved as MP3; voice recording offers no settings and files are saved as WAV. Alongside the line-in port is a standard headphone jack, followed by a standard mini-USB port. The back of the X20 reveals two nifty features--a user-replaceable battery and dual external speakers. The bottom of the unit offers yet another compelling extra: A microSD card expansion slot for adding more memory.
Features
When you connect the iriver X20 to your computer, it acts as removable storage (the internal memory and SD card show up as separate drives). Transferring files is a simple drag-and-drop affair--no software required--but if you prefer to use a jukebox, the player also works with the standard WMA players (Rhapsody, Windows Media Player, and so on). The jukeboxes could come in handy for transferring playlists (though you may also drag in M3U files), but keep in mind that the X20 does not support subscriptions, just purchased music (WMA DRM9). It also supports a variety of unprotected audio formats including MP3, WMA, WAV and Ogg Vorbis. In addition, the player takes MPEG-4 and WMV video and JPEG images.
Once there's some content on the device, navigating through it is a pleasantly simple task. The X20's interface is nearly identical to that of the Insignia MP3 Player & Image Viewer. In fact, the software is so similar that we're sure the two companies share it. The top menu is circular and icon-driven, with the current selection magnified in the center.
Digging down into the music menu provides the standard Creative interface hierarchy, with selections sorted by artist, album, genre, and so on. The X20 also has an onboard browser for navigating via folders, if that suits your fancy. Should you get sick of your own music, you can switch over to the FM radio. The tuner offers an autoscan feature with an auto-preset function (up to 20 slots), and you can make recordings here as well.
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