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CNET editors' rating:
4.0 stars
Excellent
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 166 reviews
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Product summary
CNET Editors' ChoiceMay 06
The good: Sleek and stylish, the iRiver Clix offers a unique, intuitive interface and comes with extras such as an FM radio; a voice recorder; an alarm clock; support for OGG files and subscription content; and photo, video, and text viewing. The Clix includes SRS Wow sound effects, it has good battery life, and it's priced competitively.
The bad: The iRiver Clix's ample screen is a magnet for fingerprints, and the cool and useful cradle is sold separately.
The bottom line: The iRiver Clix is a superbly designed MP3 player that's easy to use and packed with pretty much every feature in the book. If you're looking for a stylish Janus-compatible device and you don't need a boatload of storage, this is your player.
Specifications: Device type: Digital player / radio; Flash memory installed: 2 GB; Digital player supported digital audio standards: WMA, ASF, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG 1 Audio, MPEG 2.5 Audio, MPEG 2 Audio, MP3; ; See full specs
Price range: $75.99
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 05/14/2006
- Released on: 05/15/2006
Early and late adopters, as well as design heads, will fall in love with the iRiver Clix's clean, futuristic look. The compact player measures 2.7 by 1.8 by 0.6 inches, weighs 2.5 ounces, and features a bright and colorful 2.2-inch display with 320x240-pixel resolution. While there are a few small buttons on the sides, users navigate the interface by pressing the four sides of the display itself. This tactile control method--iRiver refers to it as the D-Click (thus, Clix)--combined with graphical arrows that point you in the right direction, is both intuitive and logical. Indeed, compared to previous iRiver interfaces, the Clix's is refreshingly simple and easy on the eyes. It reminds us of the Olympus M:robe 500i, except that the iRiver Clix is much smaller and doesn't have a touch-sensitive screen--a good thing. The one downside to the interface is that, while one-handed operation in possible, two-handed operation is ergonomically preferable and results in fewer smudges onscreen.
Around the edges of the iRiver Clix, you'll find the remainder of the controls. On the top are the too-tiny dedicated volume buttons, along with a pinhole mic. The right side features the power button and a smart key, which acts as a shortcut to a feature of your choice; it can take you to the main menu, play and pause music, shuffle all tracks, start and stop recording, or flip the interface 90 degrees for viewing in either landscape or portrait modes. A hold switch on the bottom of the player rounds out the controls. Beside this switch are the Reset hole and the proprietary dock connector; iRiver bundles its own USB cable to charge the player and transfer content. The headphone jack is on the left side, and a decent set of iPod-looking headphones (white to match the Clix and accessories) comes in the package. There's also a printed manual and a quick-start disc that includes Windows Media Player (WMP) 11 with Urge.
Using the Clix within WMP 11 is wonderful experience. Even though the software is in beta and needs to work out some bugs, we had no problems syncing content to and from the player. WMP makes device management even simpler with its new gas-gauge feature, which offers a visual representation of how much space is left on the device as you drag media content to the sync window. For more information on this and other handy features, read our review of WMP 11.
If you really want to have some fun, though, use the Clix with Urge. You select music from a seemingly limitless library, and even the album art comes with each track you transfer. Like a song that's part of your subscription so much that you want to own it? Click and hold the right side to go to a list of options, and select Buy. The next time you sync the player, an Urge music store window will pop up with the song you requested.
Once you get some content onto the Clix, it's a breeze to use and a pleasure to look at. The main menu, to which you can return at any time by clicking and holding the left side, lists seven options--Extras, FM Radio, Now Playing, Music, Pictures, Videos, and Settings--and each word magnifies and lights up as you scroll over it. Once in the Music submenu, you can view content by playlist, artist, song, album, or genre. Within those submenus, the screen lists seven selections as you scroll through. The playback screen is lovely, with album art displayed to the left of the track name, the song length and time elapsed, the rating (out of five stars), the artist name and year, and the album title. Beneath this info, some faded-out text announces what song is coming next--very cool.
User reviews
- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 166 reviews
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
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Showing 3 of 166 user reviewsSee all 166 user reviews
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54 out of 60 people found this review helpful
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19 out of 19 people found this review helpful
"Extremely nice - small - sexy (and useful!) multimedia player"
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15 out of 15 people found this review helpful
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iRiver Clix (2GB):
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