iRiver S10 user reviews (2GB)

4.5 stars

"Excellent full-featured mp3 player" on November 23, 2006 by saxdavew

Pros: Tiny size; FM radio; great screen

Cons: Poor FM autoscan

Summary: The S10 connects to a PC as a mass storage device, so you can just drag and drop music (or other files) onto it right away without having to install anything. You use the supplied 'iriver plus 3' software if you want though.

The OLED screen is really nice. It's bright, readible and has cool graphics, as you can see in my video of the S10 in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgh6XRcYasc

A drawback of having such a small screen, is that when it displays song titles etc, it has to scroll the ones which are too long. However, it scrolls them vertically which is a bit odd, but not a problem really.

I have reasonably big hands, and it's easily possible to navigate the D-click system with one hand, but it's more comfortable using two thumbs in my experience.

The audio quality is good, as is the FM reception. The FM radio autoscan, however, is
poor and only picks up the most powerful stations. If you tune the radio yourself though, the quality is fine. You can choose between stereo and mono mode for listening to the radio, and save up to 20 preset stations. Navigating the presets is easy, but if you want to name the stations, you need to use the 'iriver plus 3' software.

The S10 can record FM radio in three quality levels:
Low - 64 kbps MP3
Medium - 128 kbps MP3
High - 256 kbps MP3

The built-in microphone can also record in three quality levels:
Low - 32 kbps MP3
Medium - 64 kbps MP3
High - 128 kbps MP3

The S10 also has a clock mode with an alarm that can be used to automatically record the FM radio for you.

I personally havn't found the S10's 8 hour battery life to be a problem. Granted, if you are going to be away from a USB port (the only way of charging up) for more than 8 hours and plan to use the S10 continuously, then the battery life would become an issue. In practice though, if you are low on power and have a USB port available, a short charge will give you a few more hours of play time. The manual says that 1 hour of charging gives you 80% battery life, and 100% takes 1.5 hours. In my experience, the S10 charges up nice and quickly.

I have found the S10 to be an excellent player, and would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who doesn't need a huge amount of memory in an mp3 player.