iRiver X20 review

iRiver X20 Review

Reviewed by: Nate Lanxon

Reviewed on: 23 April 2007

Performance
We got 21 hours of continuous MP3 music playback from a complete charge of the player's battery. This is about average and certainly acceptable. Music quality gets top marks all round. Bass reproduction is powerful on the bass-heavy track Slam by Pendulum, yet mid-range and high-end tones are clear and well pronounced on the classical gem Naturaleza Muerta performed by Sarah Brightman.

Unsurprisingly, the supplied headphones are -- as stock headphones often tend to be -- a bit rubbish. You'll want to source a nicer pair if you care at all about music quality.

The high-resolution 56mm (2.2-inch) colour LCD screen is bright and comfortable to look at. Photos are automatically displayed horizontally and are incredibly crisp. Videos look fantastic too, providing they're encoded at a decent bit rate, such as 768Kbps MPEG-4 at 25 frames per second.

The high-resolution screen makes menus, images and videos look beautiful

The FM radio has a very fast auto seek function and it found all the stations in our local area. It also has space for 20 saved frequencies and reception quality is excellent.

For managing your media, iRiver includes its software. It's very simple to use, with a clean layout and a pleasant silver colour scheme. Transferring 1.5GB of MP3s to the X20 using the software took just under 8 minutes on our office computer. This is very quick and beats Samsung's competing YP-T9 by over 10 minutes.

The software takes care of your music, videos, photos and even text files. Videos are automatically converted into the appropriate MPEG-4 format within the software. The whole process is a one-click exercise that requires little experience, though it took our office computer over half an hour to convert a 30-minute video file.

The iRiver software is cleanly laid out and easy to use

Conclusion
With its stylish design, a great range of features and user-friendly software, the X20's got magnificent potential. Despite the mechanical scroll wheel taking a bit of getting used to, the size and quality of the screen makes this an adorable little MP3 player. Sony's NW-A808 player, however, offers comparable screen quality and video playback, but in a sleeker, tidier case and with significantly better battery life.

If you're looking for a lightweight MP3 player and feel you could be quite partial to the occasional video clip, don't overlook the iRiver X20 when making your decision.

Supplier: Advanced MP3Players.com

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield