A brilliant multi-media player! (iRiver U10 1 GB)

Member Name: chjossic

Product:	iRiver U10 1 GB
Date:	02/07/07 (129 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great design, tiny, user friendly, top quality sound

Disadvantages: PC compatible only

The iRiver U10 1GB is a really good product. I got it as a gift over a year ago now and I just feel this multi-function media player went from strength to strength in the way I've been using it.
At first I was mostly using it as an MP3 player but there is so much more to that small device I now wish I had a model with a larger capacity.

It comes with headphones, remote control and TV cradle (although I understand this is optional).
Adequate USB cables are also provided for PC use.
What you can use it for? Music, videos, pictures, text, voice memo recordings, radio and Flash games ..

In an iPod world it is quite refreshing to see iRiver with its U10 and other devices, have managed to design a nice range of attractive and performant products.
It's the perfect travel companion.

I'm definitely recommending the U10, the quality you get for that price range is hard to come by on the market, so thumbs up for me!

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Music:
Reads MP3 and WMA formats
Great sound quality

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Flash Games:
there are a few games like 'Launch Fighters', 'Puzzle', or 'Sudoku' but It is possible to download additional games.
This is based on the open Macromedia/Adobe Flash Lite platform.

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Videos:
You need a converter for that but it's quite simple to use and also pretty fast.
Download and install iriverter (http://iriverter.sourceforge.net/), it has a preset for the U10 so you can't go wrong.
You can put a normal size movie on the iRiver although it will take some space on this 1Gb model.

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Radio:
20 presets and autoscan available

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Pictures:
Great quality again, use a transfer utility from the iRiver website so you can manage and synchronize your pictures with ease.
A slideshow can be played too when viewing your photographs.

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Text:
The U10 can display text files (txt) so you could - as I did - convert e-books (PDF) to text file and 'literally' have an entire book to read.
I have not used this very much but I did try and this is quite nice.

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Recordings:
Voice or anything really .. just a great feature.

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Nice features:
- The background color for the menus changes every day.
(you can choose whatever picture you like as a background)
- Navigation controls are superb, the edges of the screen are clickable so you can go 4 directions (up, down, left, right). Note that you can lock the screens controls so you don't accidentally press an edge while the device is in a pocket or elsewhere.
- The TV cradle is superb and the sound quality coming out of it is brilliant ... I sometimes use it in my kitchen just like I would use a stereo .. with a remote :)

Oh and another thing, this is ONLY PC compatible but can be used on a Mac Intel Core Duo with the right software (ie: Parallels will allow you to run an image of a Windows operating system and thus use the iRiver U10 through the recognized USB port)

Summary: A brilliant multi-media player!

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