As well as playing MP3s, the Rio receives FM radio and will let you record live broadcasts, although not to a particularly great standard.
The Rio also lets you set 'bookmarks', which recall a specific track and play position instantly. This and the other features, including a simple stopwatch, are accessed through a series of simple sub-menus.
Performance
There's only one real way to test these 'sports' MP3 players and that's to take them extreme downhill mountain biking. We’ve seen bikers break limbs on these tracks so it was interesting to see how the Rio fared.
Fate smiled on the Rio because we didn't have any serious crashes during the testing procedure, but it did get thumped about a lot when we jumped and landed hard. The Rio didn't skip a beat.
In our informal tests, sound quality on the Rio was not quite a match for the iPod. We ran both players through flat-response studio monitors to compare the sound and found that the Rio sounded less vibrant on tracks like Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. Auditioning heavier material, the differences were less distinct -- Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana sounded almost equally punchy on both players.
The Rio has several equaliser presets designed to flatter specific genres of music -- oddly we couldn't hear any discernable difference between these presets.
FM radio reception on the Rio is what we've come to expect from pocket radios -- in areas of good reception you'll have no problem. But in places where a radio signal is slightly weaker the Rio's tiny internal aerial has no hope whatsoever of compensating -- you'll hear static, and lots of it.
The Rio's ability to record radio is useful as a kind of notepad to remind you to buy a certain song later, but it's not something we would actually use to listen to music with. The recording quality is very poor. Not only is there a significant drop in volume when you play back recorded radio, but the level of compression applied to the recording devastates it. The recorded song sounds very dull and squashed compared to the original radio source.
Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Tom Espiner
Android App 
RSS Feeds 
iPhone App 
Newsletters