iRiver H10 vs. Apple iPod
This will be a combination of my reviews of the iRiver H10 and the Apple iPod. I hope it doesn’t get too long, and I’m kind of tired and not really feeling it right now, so we’ll see how this goes.
I was always against MP3 players from the start. When the first generation iPod came out and a friend of mine got one, my first reaction to it was, “Jesus, this thing is huge, and ugly, and it sounds like crap.” That has sort of been my opinion of all MP3 players until just recently. I didn’t think anything could measure up to my standards of style and audio quality.
That is until I heard of iRiver years ago. I heard they mastered gapless playback, something that Apple has always failed at. I heard their audio quality was second to none. I heard nothing but good things. I knew that if I ever bought an MP3 player, it would be an iRiver product. I had total faith in them.
How I wandered onto the iRiver site one lazy Sunday afternoon is beyond me. I saw the H10 there, on the front page, staring me in the face. It had a color screen, it could display photos, and it was ridiculously tiny. Oh, and it was $300.00 that I didn’t really have. I wanted one immediately, even though it was only 5 gigabytes. I thought about it and decided not to, that it would be a bad idea.
A week later, after doing a little more research into it and learning about the problems mentioned below, and still wanting it, I walked into Best Buy and picked one up.
I took it home, opened it up, and I thought it was sexy as hell. It seemed cumbersome to me that the sync cable had a second cable coming off the connector that you had to plug into a separate AC adapter. Seemed lame to me that the iPod (which I knew a lot about despite ignorantly loathing) could charge from the USB2.0 port, but the big and mighty iRiver player could not. Extra cables are bad.
The first major problem with the iRiver H10 is that it uses MTP, a file transfer/hard drive protocol for portable devices. MTP effectively “locks” the hard drive on the H10 down, allowing you to only put music files in the music folder, and other nonsense. On top of that, it requires you to use Windows Media Player 10 to transfer music to your player. This is a big pain in the ass.
MTP also causes file transfers to take exceedingly long. It took about 45 minutes to sync a whole 4.6 gigabytes to the unit. This is a pain in the ass, when you consider I synced 12 gigabytes to my iPod in 30 minutes, it seems inexcusable for the H10. Also, did I mention that you have to use Windows Media Player 10 to transfer files? You can drag and drop files from Explorer, but it takes a very long time and sometimes locks up.
Also, WMP10 support is buggy, as I could never get playlists to transfer properly, and a very small number of people have. So, scratch usage of playlists off the list of ‘features’.
Second problem became readily apparent once you upload music to the unit and want to listen to an album. The H10 only sorts Alphabetically by track title. It doesn’t sort by track number like any normal player, nope, it will only sort by track title. The only way you can play an album in order is if you go into Browse mode (directory tree viewing) and playing your tracks, and this only works if your file naming convention is set to “## – Title”, otherwise the same problem occurs, alphabetical sorting. (Browse mode operates very slowly, a few second pause on the first load of every single folder occurs, slowing down browse time significantly.) Also, if you manually upload using drag and drop, Windows will upload your files out of order, exposing the most annoying problem with the iRiver: before it sorts alphabetically, it sorts everything by “Date Modified”, so if you upload one artist before the other, the second artist will be displayed at the bottom of the list, even though it should be on top when sorted alphabetically. This results in directory listings, (albums, artists, tracks) that are horribly out of order on the unit.
I also bought the unit partly for the fact that it had a color screen and could view photos. The color screen is nice, the design of the menus is fairly attractive, very sharp and easy to see. But, when you use it to view photos, you realize it looks about 50 times worse than first generation camera phones. Most of the time you can’t even tell what you’re looking at. Scratch picture viewing off as one of the selling points.
FM radio sounds great, but who gives a shit about that?
Sound quality is great, of course, coming from iRiver, but when you can’t play your music in the proper order, who cares about sound quality? (Playback is not gapless, either, though the gap between tracks was smaller than on the iPod.)
I put up with the H10 for about four days before I returned it to Best Buy and got myself an Apple iPod for $20.00 more.
I would not ever recommend the H10 to anyone. At this point, I wouldn’t recommend any iRiver products to anyone. iRiver’s inability to release a player that functions properly out of the box is highly disrespectful to the people who are willing to pay the extra money for ‘iRiver Quality’.
I’m not going to fork over $280 to a company for a device that may eventually work properly.
Neither should you.
If you wanted my money, iRiver, then you probably should have actually released a quality product. Too bad for you, Apple has my money now.
I was hesitant to buy the iPod. I’ve been anti-iPod almost from the very beginning. I don’t know why, just anti-Apple in general. I didn’t think the iPod could have the sound quality I wanted.I was wrong.I should make this short, but I wont. If you want it short, I will say this:
The iPod is everything I could have ever dreamed of, and more.
The iPod is sexy. It’s gorgeous. It makes me smile just to look at it. I am not joking.
The iPod sounds great. Audio quality is on par, if not maybe better than, the iRiver H10. This is good. It really depends on your headphones, though. Don’t complain about lousy bass or whiny treble until you try it through a variety of speakers and headphones. On my Sony MDR-EX51SP’s, the iPod sounds like the bass is there, maybe even too pronounced, but lacks any sort of detail. This is due to the earphones, however. Through my car, the iPod sounds as good as my CDRs burned with Foobar processing.
The iPod is a joy to navigate. I didn’t think I’d like the click wheel, but I can’t imagine going back to the H10’s simple vertical thumb pad. Scrolling through a hundred or so artists, or thousands of songs, could never be easier, I don’t care what they say. The pad feels perfect, just perfect.
The iPod is so intuitive, sometimes I think I am going to cry. There is something so awesome about rating tracks on the player so easily, and then being able to go into Anapod (more on this later) and set up a playlist for my top rated tracks. The shuffle feature and playlists make me look at music like I’ve never seen it before. I’ve spent the last six hours listing to a shuffle of a playlist composed solely of music from the 90’s. (Roughly 1,200 tracks on my iPod.) I will spend many more hours listening to this single playlist, like this. It’s helping me hear music I haven’t heard in a long time, and helping me rate tracks for that aforementioned Top Rated playlist I’m working on.
I would be hard pressed to find even a single problem with the iPod. Sure, tracks aren’t played perfectly gapless, but I don’t mind when everything else is so perfect. The backlight on the iPod is so bright that it seems a little blinding in my car, but that’s nitpicking. (Speaking of driving, operating the iPod while driving is about one hundred times more dangerous than changing CDs while driving, I find. I’ve almost killed myself more times in the last two days fiddling with my iPod then I have in two years of CD changing.) But, aside from those two things, I have no other complaints.
As far as software for it goes…
iTunes sucks ass. I hate iTunes.
ephPod is pretty cool, but no longer being developed, and it has no real features outside of “upload music to your ipod” and a nifty Calendar edit mode. Also, it scrambles Playcounts, making them multiple digit numbers that don’t mean anything.
Anapod, however, is practically perfect. If I could dream of an editor for my iPod, it would be pretty damn close to Anapod. Anapod supports dynamic playlists like iTunes does, so you can configure lists that will auto-match based on parameters you define, and fill up a playlist with however much music you want in it. (These do not update automatically each tme you add music to the iPod, though. Minor nusiance.) Other features of it work well, and it uploads to the iPod faster then ephPod or iTunes did. If you own an iPod and use a Windows machine, Anapod is what you need.
In short, the iPod is perfect. It’s increased my productivity at work, as listening to it makes me so happy that I am more attentive to my patients and more willing to take the extra time to go the extra mile in caring for them. It’s made me happier in general. Going outside isn’t scary anymore. (However, why people insist on walking up to and trying to talk to me when I am obviously listening to music and can’t hear them is fucking beyond me. Then they stand there staring at me with a fucked up contorted look on their face until I finally turn my head and see them staring me directly in the eyes.)If you want an MP3 player, buy an iPod.
Please, for the love of God, buy a damn iPod.
Excellent review!
Now something to get a windows user’s hair bristling… replace the experience between the iRiver and the iPod by respectively Windows XP and Mac OS X, because that is the experience any “switcher to Mac OS X” will have when comparing both OS. Then you’ll understand why a Mac user just smiles when he uses his/her OS.
swissfondue said this on February 10th, 2005 at 1:36 am
I support swissfondue comments :-)
“The iPod is everything I could have ever dreamed of, and more.”
Yeah, the whole Apple experience is a pleasure. Hopefully the use of the iPod will change your view of Apple. Apple products work. They work well, and are very reliable. I use both computer systems (and have for 16 plus years). There is no comparison between Apple and everyone else.
JPO said this on February 10th, 2005 at 6:36 am
Oh, I can’t understand why you hate iTunes! iTunes rules. Most everyone I know of that uses iTunes on the PC makes comments on how well thought out and feature rich iTunes is. Oh well, can’t please everyone.
JPO said this on February 10th, 2005 at 6:39 am
I was all set to buy an Apple machine, until I sat down in front of one for the first day of a Photoshop class, and nothing seemed to work right for me. It was mostly that the mouse movement made me want to kill myself, and I think the Dock is the most unintuitive piece of software ever imagined for program management. It just annoyed me.
Part of me loves how ‘solid’ and ‘hard to use’ Windows machines are. Part of me enjoys the stuggle.
I hate iTunes for that sort of reason, it’s oversimplified, it’s slow, it’s a ram hog, and for being such a ram hog, it doesn’t sound as good or play as well as Foobar2000 does. I am a foobar2000 child.
Brad said this on February 10th, 2005 at 11:49 am
haha, call me nuts, but I’ve always thought Windows was easier to use than MacOS :X
Dan said this on February 10th, 2005 at 1:48 pm
Hey Dan… you’re nuts!
Ted said this on February 27th, 2005 at 6:04 am
What do you mean it requires WMP 10 to transfer? I have it set to UMS, so I can just drag and drop :).
iRiverFan said this on March 1st, 2005 at 10:51 am
“I would not ever recommend the H10 to anyone. At this point, I wouldn’t recommend any iRiver products to anyone. iRiver’s inability to release a player that functions properly out of the box is highly disrespectful to the people who are willing to pay the extra money for ‘iRiver Quality’.”
Wow, you never really used the H3×0 or H1×0 have you? You get what you pay for and more. I play video’s on mine, I view pictures, lyrics. Soon Rockbox will be released and add support for MusePack and AAC to the iRiver. Also for you iPod freaks that will go But iPod plays games”. Good for you, so will the iRiver, it will play Gameboy games, probably Gameboy color ones on the H3×0 and hopefully GBA games, since there are enough buttons.
iRiverFan said this on March 1st, 2005 at 10:55 am
I love how the zealots always play the game anonymously, as if they have so much to prove that they’re too scared to reveal who they really are.
Sorry, iRiver H10 sucks ass, and that’s what the review was about. Not another product by iRiver, just the H10, and the H10 reflects very poorly on iRiver.
Brad said this on March 1st, 2005 at 4:26 pm
ipod sucks h10 rocks you dont know what your talking about loser
rob said this on March 16th, 2005 at 5:43 am
maybe iriver h10 will be a little behind with hard-drive based mp3, but iRIVER beats Apple with flash player (those ones with 1gb) in every cateogory.
Just because iRIVER released a product that is less demanding than ipod doesnt mean all iriver products all junks.
have u ever used flash players? have u ever used h320?
all apple has is its tiny ghetto ipod player and its ridiculously junkish shuffle.
if you are such an ipod fan, lol, go compare ipod shuffle with iriver flash player. you’ll be licking iriver’s ass that apple didnt dominate the flash mp3 player industry with their junk.
iRIVER DESPERATE said this on March 16th, 2005 at 11:24 pm
You are the stupidest most idiotic guy in the world
Mp3 fan said this on March 18th, 2005 at 11:50 am
You should settle down its just a Mp3 player guy
Mp3 fan # 2 said this on March 18th, 2005 at 11:51 am
This is all there is to say:
http://easyh10.sourceforge.net/
Paul said this on January 4th, 2006 at 11:47 pm
The h10 FUCKING BLOWS i have one, 1 month old, 300 dollars, fucked up already, Lame.
Puto said this on February 20th, 2006 at 2:48 am
I bought an iRiver H10 6GB about 6 months ago, and have had problems ever since. First the fucking thing wouldn’t load music on, and I had to download several updates and format the drive about 12 times. Now the touch pad is screwed – the fucking thing either holds “down” of its own accord, or doesnt work at all. Obviously this makes browsing files IMPOSSIBLE. Also, the “shuffle” option is crap. It mixes up the tracks….in EXACTLY the same order every time. So basically either u play all your music in alphabetical order, or in the same gay-ass “shuffle” all the time. And the only way to get decent sound out of the thing is by using SRS WOW - which drains the battery to such an extent that their “12 hours” of playback becomes 35minutes
I wish I had bought an iPod, even putting up with iTunes would be better than this. Although in my eyes, the red H10 is the sexiest mp3 out there :)
FUCK IRIVER
They have NO support network if anything goes wrong with your player – after about 6 emails to the fuckers I have recieved no information about support or solutions.
Regrettably, the iPod is popular for a good reason – it does what its supposed to do. If only I wasnt a student, I would go out and buy one now – and take great pleasure in MELTING my H10.
Bad decision said this on February 26th, 2006 at 8:48 am
Hi, stumbled on this while trying to work out what to do when my H10 locked up – so no it is not perfect!
But your review is way over the top – or perhaps iRiver have just fixed some of the problems. I have no problem synching playlists to my H10 from WMP, once I’d spent 60 seconds fnding out how to do it.
Transfer speed is also not a problem for me, and tracks are sorted correctly.
Yes using WMP is a little bit of a pain but it is way better that iTunes!
I bought an H10 beacuse I have had an iRiver ifp895 512MB flash player for ageswhich is a great little player but I got fed up with the limited space.
Where I work (in IT department) more people seem to have iRivers than iPods and I’ve not heard many complaints from those with iRivers. In the UK iRivers also seem to be cheaper than Apple – so there is no paying extra for iRiver.
Maybye you got a duff model, maybye iRiver did release the H10 when it still had a few problems (like the Nano?) but don’t write off a whole companies product range because of one bad experience!
(BTW you need to sort out the line wrapping in your text box it sucks! :-) )
Iain said this on March 4th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
april 13, 2006 – have the new iriver 20 gig ant $360 out-the-d66r and have been staring at it with the USB busy… Do Not Disconnect” looking at me from the color screen after the sinc prog crashed on the computer NBD- I’ll just turn off and reboot or whatever and start over – - one problem – the off switch doesn’t turn anything off – my usual way to fix shitty proramming and cheap ass engineering – this will be back tomorow thru the i-window of the futuretronics shop – kiss my ass engineers – go back to geek school or where ever you came from – simple shit ( like the simple ass shit you build) requires simple solutions – like an off switch that works – just like when they fire your ass …
eph said this on April 12th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
main reason i bought an H10 was for the replaceable battery…then realised that the 20GB model’s battery is internal. the sound quality is not great, the photo viewer is dire and it does take ages to disconnect safely after file transfer. I didn’t want an ipod because i wanted to be able to use my player against anyone’s media library, not just my own but the H10 has been a huge disappointment and i wish that iriver hadn’t discontinued the H320.
holden said this on April 27th, 2006 at 7:11 am
I completely agree that the iRiver H10 is a piece of crap. I’ve had nothing but problems with it. Also, the company’s customer support is almost non-existent. All they tell you to do is upgrade the firmware when you have an issue with the player. That is, if you can get a hold of them. Unfortunately, the place I bought it, Best Buy, will not accept the player for a refund because it’s past 30 days. I’ve tried contacting iRiver and of course all they will do is replace the player. This doesn’t really do me any good as the player design or engineering is crap, its not just my player that isn’t working. No point in getting another piece of crap. Guess I’ll have to get an iPod, at least they work.
Dan said this on May 2nd, 2006 at 5:44 am
@ “bad decision”
That’s exactly the same experience I had with the player and the company. Absolutely terrible.
Dan said this on May 2nd, 2006 at 1:53 pm
quit your winging you bunch of wankers.
GET A LIFE
Love Vesh.
Louise said this on June 21st, 2006 at 2:12 am
I have a Iriver 20Gb and have experienced some of the issues mentioned above such as slow file transfer and lockups with transfering files. How ever I still Love my Iriver H10. Iriver does provide email support. The first thing all H10 users should do is upgrade the firmware on their player to Ver 2.51 This fixes a few bugs and makes the player faster and more stable.
Next I hate using Windows Media Player 10. The good news is you DO NOT have too. You need to do the “UMS Trick” and you can simply drag and drop files with awsome speed. But after you have done this you will need the Easy H10 software to update your players MP3 database.
Now the other great use for Easy H10 is the playlist converter, you can convert Winamp playlists too your Iriver! I love this. Yes you can also do playlists with Windows Media Player 10 if you want to.
Check out the Easy H10 Website http://easyh10.sourceforge.net/index.html
I still love my Iriver H10 & glad I can stay away from windows Media Player and Itunes.
Cheers
Buff http://www.buffsworld.com/iriver.html
Buff said this on July 22nd, 2006 at 6:23 am
I got an iriver H10 6GB MP3 player as a present from my parents for goos school marks.
Biggest mistake of my life to choose that MP3 player!
Within a week I had problems with it, files were dissapearing and all of a sudden I recieved a ‘system files missing’ message and had to update and format the player. it was working again for some time, and aside from problems already mentioned here. Now again I’ve had problems with files simply dissapearing…maybe this is because of this time I just dragged and dropped the files.
Also, to make matters better, I’m going to be getting a Mac OS X soon. I’ll still have my XP computer at my parents for another year, but I don’t want to have to rely on it to transfer my music all the time, hopefully this easyH10 website people were talking about will work or I’m screwed, seeing as it’s been over 30 days so I doubt I’ll get a refund.
After all this struggle, I may end up saving up for an ipod and selling this one in later years.
Sarah said this on September 7th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
iriver sucks.
They used to make some great products, namely the H320/H340. But guess what? They don’t make those anymore. They were too good, so they cancelled them, and replaced them with the suck-ass H10. All their other newer players are crap too.
iriver may have made some nice products in the past, but the past is the past. Now, iriver just sucks.
Grishnakh said this on October 26th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
I had h340. It was a brick. Nice functions but too huge. Sold it.
And now I have h10, as mentioned, file transfer is way too slow in MTP. Yes, you can swithc to UMS, but it is very troublesome. The instruction on how to reset to UMS is not very clear. WMP 10 support sucks big time. Also, h10 touchpad is very very hard to use compared to iPod click wheel. I almost hate to use my h10 because of the touchpad.
I also have a iPod video. It is a masterpiece. Itunes is a good software. And third party software support is all over the palce. The drawback is lack of FM and recording function. But overall, a very neat device.
chuliu said this on November 4th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
You and I share the same sentiments. I have hated iPod for some reason… when I found iRiver I thought that I had found something different and better and I wasn’t just jumping off of a cliff like all of the other lemmings in the MP3 market. I was so pleased to get my iRiver in the mail and I immediately began burning my 3000 cd collection to hard drive to begin loading my favorites to my new player. I experienced all of the same problems with it that you did… WMP10 lagging, unsorting albums, picture display is crappy, the record feature is good, but rarely used as often as I thought I’d need it… and then after about 5 months of use, it starts hanging all of the time. I had to let the battery die all of the way… until I found the reset button… then I’m resetting the thing every day. Now, it won’t even finish it’s startup from the reboot. Some albums wouldn’t play back at all… and they were all .wav files compatible with WMP10… I don’t know what the hell iRiver is trying to do, but if you try to call their “customer service” be prepared to get into the longest hold line of your life… and you will neeeeeeeeeeeeever speak to anyone… but they sure will hurang you with advertising for their other bs products! I sent them an email and am still awaiting resolution. I am on my way to buy an iPod right now. And I hate it. I’m hoping that I’ll find the satisfaction that I deserve in an iPod. I’m really jaded about having to jump off of this cliff with no other alternatives in sight.
Dave said this on November 12th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
I got an Iriver h10, because I had heard that it was good.
First, I had prbolems installing it. Finally I had to install it with the windows control panel with the “add hardware” option, and the icon at the bottom right corner was different and i could not safely remove it by clicking. An E-mail i sent went unanswered.
Then I noticed it was sometimes very slow and sometimes froze.
I also had strange caracters and symbols appearing on the screen playlists disappearing…
Lately, I had the sound was distorted crackling noises that were loud even when the volume was not loud.
Now the system files are missing.
ns in
Paul said this on December 23rd, 2006 at 10:46 am
Personally I think the h10 is great, the sound quality is as you said brilliant. I’ve had a few problems with the h10 but once I had updated my firmware everything works well. The uploading times are a bit annoying but you cant have everything.
Also, I would like to point out that ipods are definately not perfect. out of about 200 people I know that have them about 150 have had to replace them when their old ones broke for no reason. Not cracks etc. they just stopped working.
The battery on the iriver is a definate bonus. It’s easy to take out so if the h10 freeze’s you can just take out the battery. If the ipod freezes you have to wait for hours for it to run out of battery unless you want to start taking it apart. (both of these have happened to me before, the ipod freezing and the h10 freezing)
Overall I think that this review is way too harsh as have never had any major problems with my iriver.
Stuart said this on December 27th, 2006 at 11:41 am
One of the main reasons I had selected the H10 it was because of the ability to drag and drop through explorer and not have to go through any proprietary software. While you can, it is not like a slave drive and you cannot do much but copy a file to the Music folder.
In trying to load my library of songs, I found it was taking forever. So I came across the “UMS Trick”. I could now use it as a slave drive and copy over files at amazing speed. I spent several hours doing this…well come to find out all it would do is lockup when I tried to access any of the songs.
I also have had several instances of lock-up’s. Yes, I downloaded the latest Iriver firmware. I just don’t want to be stuck with this thing if what everyone else is saying is what I have to look forward to.
I found the link to the Rockbox firmware and am tempted to load it. Especially with all the features that it seems to have, like Crossfade (which it seems like nobody has this capability). I just don’t know if it will be too geeky. It seems like the interface is very DOS-ish, like my old 5 pound MP3 Player, the Archos Jukebox Recorder 15. Also, I don’t know if the lockup’s are a firmware or a hardware issue and if loading Rockbox would make this apparent lockup issue or usability any better.
So my question is: Should I try the Rockbox firmware on this thing, or just send it back while I can?
Paul said this on December 28th, 2006 at 3:10 pm
yeah..yeah..same thing..spent good money on an iriver(my girlfriend and i bought one each)..and now they are both useless..one freezes & doesnt play tracks and the other has major problems with the scrolling and is fucked..plus no support from the iriver customer services despite numerous emails..in short.. fuck you iriver you took my money and i wanna punch you in the face..you suck and everyone i know, knows it too!My shitty ass cd walkman gave me much more love!!
steve said this on January 14th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Regards! – Tooo true (iRiver H10 vs. Apple iPod). Well done article, I hope it gets picked up on the internet more and more. FYI, I found you quite by accident while searching on ‘Picture of child hair style’. I feel lucky to have found your Blog. Keep thinking and posting!
Picture Of Child Hair Style said this on October 13th, 2007 at 6:13 pm