iRiver Clix

In the history of electronics there have always been products that people fall in love with as soon as people see them.  The iRiver Clix series has always been one of those.  Now, iRiver hasn’t impressed me much with their other models, but the Clix series took the concept of a PMP in a new direction.  Design has always had to balance usability with screen and beauty, and the Clix solved this dilemma in such an amazing and simple way.

iRiver continues to taunt us with these products.  The only problem:  to every product, no matter its greatness, there is a catch.  The catch with the Clix series has always been the storage:price ratio.  Too little storage for too much of a price.  The other drawback?  A PMP simple does not work well with 512mb of storage.  Even low end conversions for movies range around 300mb.

Hopefully iRiver can solve their ratio problems with this player.  4GB is a very good storage size.  I don’t see anyone actually watching full length movies on this, but for short clips and a good sized music library it is a good size.  I’m only hoping that their price point can stay competitive so that this model series can take off.

Clix homepage

iRiver T10 2GB avail in US now

iRiver, an interesting DAP maker, has released a higher capacity version of their ho-hum T10 player.

This player is interesting, containing that which you would expect of an iRiver: recording, radio, battery, gigantic size, etc.  Anything new?  Na, just that it’s 2GB now.  They’re finally stepping up to the plate to join the other flash players (Creative, where are you boys?  still sucking?  ok, reasonable enough)

I don’t specifically hate this player, but I’ve never quite been impressed by the flash iRiver players.  The battery cases are behind the screens thus making them into triangular beasts that you never seen in the pictures or product boxes, and in this specific case, the color screen sucks and is no where near as clear as in that picture.

The one thing this does have going is the price point.  A MSRP of $150 means you can probobly score it for $130-$150.  Honestly, not too shabby.

However, iRiver, please lower the prices of the U10 series so people can consider buying them!  Every person that sees them falls in love immediately, but the price point is way too high in comparison to the others… Please, iRiver, think of the puppies.