- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 5 reviews Back to product review
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1 out of 1 people found this review helpful
2.5 stars
"Amazing, but short on compatibility"
Pros: Awesome design, great feature set
Cons: Poor compatibility - WinXP ONLY
Summary: iRiver has made a very cool multi-format media player, but it has a crippling compatibility problem. The Pros: The design is very sleek and almost the entire top surface is used for the brilliant color screen. It is a very cool looking player with good sound, innovative design and a brilliantly clear screen. It even lets you read text files (reading PDFs would be better, but the text display could make it useful for business travel) and play flash games. The Con: It is only compatible with Windows XP and Microsoft Windows Media Player. If you use a different version of Windows or if you use Mac or Linux this player won't work at all for you. After researching online I found that there is no firmware update that can fix this problem. iRiver is shipping only crippled MTP versions of the U10 to North America and Europe; the fully functional UMS version is only available in Korea and certain other countries. Apparently iRiver is now doing this with all their T and U products distributed in North America and Europe. I don't want to be tied to Microsoft software and don't want the risk of my player and music files becoming obsolete with the next wave of software updates or DRM technology. Unfortunately I only discovered this compatibility problem after purchasing. I have since bought a Cowon iAudio and absolutely love my iAudio. The iRiver U10 is very cool and I hope the compatibility problem is fixed.
