1. Portable Video For All

Since the integration of video into Apple's iPod line, the market has never been bigger for portable video players. While some of the competition in the market has been established since long before Apple made the move towards offering video content, other established manufacturers have made the jump to video by now as well. With that in mind we decided to take a look at iRiver's U10.

While other players use hard disk based mass storage, iRiver took a much lighter approach.

... a staaar.

The U10 comes in two flavors, 1 GB and 2 GB, with little other than storage size to differentiate them. The U10 is flash based, giving iRiver more leeway in terms of design. It's impossible not to be impressed by the iRiver's physical look and feel since it measures only 2.7" x 1.9" x 0.6" (6.9 x 4.7 x 1.6 cm) and weighs in at a mere 2.5 oz (70 g). While much of this size difference might well be dictated by its 2.2" display, a substantial amount is due directly to the memory used.

While we're talking about the screen, its 320x240 pixels might leave something to be desired among videophiles, but for those of us just looking to watch an episode of Lost on the bus, there should be no real quality issue.

The U10's design ensures that attention is never far from the screen; while others struggle with the user interface, it looks as though some "out of the box" thinking has made this a truly impressive piece of hardware. Apple has its click wheel and Creative flirts with touch sensitivity in the Zen series, but the U10 instead turns the four sides of the display itself into buttons. It's an ingeniously simple step, making control more intuitive than that on most other players, and certainly more so than the omnipresent click wheel.

Join our discussion on this topic