iRiver H10 5GB

Posted by T3 Online on Wed 31 Oct 2007

Three Chemical Brothers and a Britney Spears to go.

This iRiver wants the world! Not only does it offer JPEG viewing on its 260,000-colour screen but it's also compatible with the new Napster To Go service, which enables you to download Napster 2.0 tracks and listen to them away from your computer.

Once we got over the excitement, initial impressions weren't great. On greeting our computer the iRiver went straight off to update both the software and the player's firmware, and on installation the unit promptly froze, saying it had no power connected, and we had to resort to pulling out the battery. Not a great start really.

Next, getting Napster To Go running proved to be a colossal pain, with little or no help available from the three parties involved: Napster, iRiver and Microsoft, whose Media Player 10 needs to be installed to transfer the tracks to the H10. However, once up and running, the ability to play whatever music you want wherever you go makes it all okay. It's worth the £5 extra it costs on top of Napster's standard £10 monthly fee.

Our experience was helped by the fact that the H10 is a very capable 5GB MP3 player, with an easy-to-use menu system, good sound quality and a decent implementation of the increasingly popular touch-sensitive scroll bar. It also comes with an impressive pair of Sennheiser headphones, and while the battery life ran out before its claimed 12-hour limit, it still saw us through a couple of days.

It took a while, but we eventually overcame our initial doubts and grew very fond of the iRiver H10/Napster combination. Now the software and firmware have been updated, things should operate more smoothly.