mp3-cd players

This iriver player is superb! Coupled with Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones, it forms the ultimate travellers set for under $500. The iriver player (in its case) slips neatly into the Bose case outer sleeve too - nice!

Neat features of this player worthy of mention:
- Battery life is great - 16 hours standard (rechargable) with up to 55 hours when used with the external battery pack.
- Functional behaviour is extremely customisable. There are many menus available to get it to work just how you want it to.
- Player is firmware upgradable! As new formats come out, iriver can provide firmware upgrades to allow your player to be able to play them. Most others it supports what it supports and that's it.
- You get a free car kit including tape deck adaptor and car charger - very handy
- the unit is very light and compact - less than one and a half centimetres thick - one of the thinnest on the market
- It supports Winamp playlists. Simply include your playlist onto the CD you burn and the iriver player can load it up.
- The remote is excellent
- the overall product quality is superb

Why it is better than a Hard Drive MP3 player:
- Battery life is way better
- CDs are cheap as chips and you can fit around 10 hours of music on a CD anyway (if this is not enough for your trip or whatever, just take another CD along with you!)
- the iriver CD player costs WAY less than a HD player. For $188, this product is a bargain! :)

Pros: Mp3 Playback, Thin design, Innovative remote, good battery life, fm tuner, car accessories included.

Cons: Needs remote to operate, small text on remote, no "true" jog dial, horrible pack-in headphones.

This player rocks. It plays as if it was an MP3 player instead of a cd player with the use of the remote. You can bring up menues upon menues of desired preferences. Blue back-light makes it look very cool. Did i mention that this thing very slim. About the size of 6 cd's stacked together. The sound is great with built in equalizer. You can adjust the high's and low's along with the bass. Distortion is nonexistant. This player plays all your music cd's, cd-r's, cd-rw's. Burn your Mp3's on a disk and get over 100 songs on a single disk. The player also recognizes WMA files along with your mp3's. You can save a winamp playlist and it will read them too! Accessories are abundent with car adapters as well as battery packs. The included headphones suck. You can hear something out of them, but if you have quality headphones, use those instead. A slight nag about the remote is that the jog dials doesn't rotate completely and act like levers, and also the play and stop button takes a lot of face space. Why didn't they include forward or back on the face as well? Other than that...awesome player.

I need to start off by saying, that i really wish i could give this product but a 4 1/2, but...amazon wont let me! But on with the review!

~ok, this player is simple amazing...i knew what to expect from the machine (considering the hours and hours of research that i did) and this beautiful player fulfilled that and SO much more. I chose this over the sony D-ne1, and i'm happy i did!

Design

~the design is simple, but modern. There's no screen at all on the player itself, it's even void of controls! it's all been placed on their remote. The player itself isn't actually a circle, it's actually an oval, but the extra space on the top is so small that i doubt it's noticable at all that it's not a circle. The player is very light, and seems very fragile, but what can you expect considering how much it ways? the remote has the same kind of feel to it. But overall it's a great looking machine.

Remote

~ this and the somewhat fragile design is why i had to give the player 4 1/2 stars. The remote itself is just as well designed as the player, but it can be sooo confusing at times... it takes a lot of getting used too, but once you have gotten used to it, it's actually quite simple. But that means, if you're thinking about sharing it with friends or whatever, they may need some tutorials in the use of it. The jog sticks also act as buttons to go through the menus and such, and these are your main navigation tools. The stop and play buttons only act as what their names describe. Also a BIG problem with the remote is that larger headphones, where the jack is larger even though it's still a 1/8th size don't completely fit in! this can be truly annoying when your trying to use some of the nicer headphones out with with this player. i own a pair of AKG K240S, and with them i'm using a 1/8th adapter from radioshack, i can't even fit it in all the way to get the full effect of the headphones! and yes, it is the right stereo phone plug size...

*Overall!

~beautiful player+great remote once you get used to it
~thing and small! a great combination
~problems with headphone plug-ins
~fragile design