Why are Korean digital media player manufacturers so much more open than their U.S. counterparts when it comes to supporting popular audio and video formats?

Take iRiver’s new Spinn MP4 Player, for instance. This device supports not only the MP3 and WMA audio codecs, but also Ogg Vorbis, Monkey’s Audio (a proprietary lossless codec), and FLAC (an open-source lossless codec).

In comparison, Apple’s iPod supports only MP3 (as well as AAC, with or without DRM; Apple Lossless; and WAV; codecs the Spinn does not support), and Microsoft’s Zune supports only MP3 and WMA (as well as AAC, WMA Pro, and WMA Lossless; codecs the Spinn also does not support).

The Spinn is named for its unique spindle-based control mechanism mounted on the right side of the device. You can navigate through player’s graphical user interface either by twisting the spindle with your thumb or by tapping the 3.3-inch active-matrix OLED touch-screen.

Since OLEDs (the acronym stands for organic light-emitting diode) are naturally luminescent, they don’t require a battery-consuming backlight, unlike the LCDs used in most portable digital media players. The touch-screen uses a haptic interface, which means it reacts to vibrations.

In addition to the audio formats listed above, the Spinn has a built-in FM radio and can record either from the radio or built-in microphone. The player supports video in the MPEG4, WMV9, and XVID formats, and digital photos in BMP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF formats.

The feature list is impressive, but the Spinn had better sound—and look—utterly fantastic if it’s to justify iRiver’s lofty pricing: The lesser of the two models comes with just 4GB of flash memory and is priced at $249.99; the 8GB model is expected to fetch $289.99—$60 more than Apple’s 8GB iPod Touch.