iRiver IFP-1090

Posted by T3 Online on Mon 22 Oct 2007

A camera that plays music - wow, what a treat!

With digital cameras now built into virtually every mobile phone, it seems like an odd time to integrate one into an MP3 player. But that's exactly what iRiver has done with this baby.

Design-wise, the player follows the company's other flash memory models pretty closely, except there's a bit of extra bulk to make room for the camera.

The snapper is mounted on the rear in a rotating barrel that acts as the lens cover, while to frame your shots, you use the colour screen on the front of the device. Unfortunately, the quality of the pictures is pretty poor. There's just a 0.3-megapixel sensor in the camera, so the teeny shots are no better than you'll achieve with most cam-phones. You're definitely not going to want to use this for any kind of serious photography.

In terms of audio, it puts in a better performance. The sound quality is crisp and clean, and there are plenty of equaliser and virtual surround sound options to beef up the sonics, should you feel the need.

However, data transfers take place over a USB 1.1 connection, so it can take an age to download just a few albums. Another issue is that the player doesn't appear on a PC as a removable drive, so you can't just drag and drop music onto it - instead, you have to use the less- than-inspiring software.

All in all, we were unimpressed with this model - it's ultimately just a pretty poor MP3 player with a ho-hum digital camera bolted on.