The iRiver H10 Rant/Review

Take a beautiful product, severly cripple it, throw in a few cheap nuggets as a 'bonus,' and you have the iRiver H10. The H10 has a beautiful full colour LCD screen, can record conversations and radio, which it also plays. You can also store images and text data on the H10. So far, so good. Well, good goes out the window at about this point. Normally I try to see the positive in a product, as much as possible, but the iRiver H10 is crippled in so many ways that it's really hard to say good things about something which frustrates you so much!

My first rant is about the H10's total incompatibility with just about every 'other' operating system on the planet. Unless you're running Windows XP with at least service pack one, forget about the H10. This means users of Mac OS, Linux, Windows 95/95/98/ME will be extremely frustrated with this player. Hacks exist to use the H10 with these OS's, but iRiver's bone-headed decision to cripple the North American version of the H10 by using some non-standard Microsoft-based format makes the H10 useless for a good part of their target market. According to the Linux-incompatibility list this problem doesn't exist with International versions of the H10.

The second and third rants I have about the H10 involve the placement of the power button, and the cheapish rubber casing. Sliding the H10 into the rubber casing with one hand is quite a chore, and I almost always inveritably hit the power button trying to get the H10 back into its case. I did this 30 minutes into a 50 minute podcast – talk about frustrating! I'm also not fond of the case rubber, it feels the kind of rubber toy you'd give your dog to knaw on, and the cloudy clear-look makes it look like something that would get this review censored if I mentioned it. Okay, it looks like a thick version of a condom. The H10 is a nice looking player, and I'm sure the intention was to show off how nice it looks, but this case doesn't do that job. I also have an issue with the belt clip on the case. The clip itself is really good, so good that it's really too good for the flimsy rubber that surrounds it. It's difficult to attach the clip to a belt, I feel as if I stretch the clip anymore the rubber from the case is going to break apart.

Which brings me to my last rant, non-standard connectors. The H10 uses USB 2.0, but to interface it with your computer you need iRiver's special cable (included). This is a minor issue I have with companies that attempt to jail people into buying their expansion products by making something slightly different than what's standard.

Overall, the player itself is quite nice. It's everything else about the player, its incompatibility, its non-functional casing, and the proprietary connection, that make it a poor choice in a world where lots of alternatives exist.

If I could send a message to iRiver it would be: shame on you for selling out to Microsoft for a few extra bucks! You probably lost a good portion of your market doing so. Perhaps you might think you'll gain more of your target market siding with Microsoft, but the fact is, even with Windows XP, SP2, your product can be difficult to get properly synchronizing. You've taken something that could be great and turned it into something that's garbage.