August 18, 2005 - With everyone gunning for Apple's iPod line of portable music players, iriver has come to market with its iriver H10, a mini-sized player that borrows a few tricks from Apple's lineup. Sporting a miniature size and 5GB, 6GB or 20GB of storage space, the player line seems to target Apple's iPod mini and lowest-priced photo series.

We're taking a look at the 20GB version today, which seems to be the best bang-for-the-buck of the three H10 variations. The 5GB versions runs for $249, the 6GB for $279 and the 20GB for $299. In other words, the 20GB has 4X the storage of the 5GB version for 20% more money. Seems like the best way to go for us.


The coolest and most immediately noticeable thing about the H10 is its interface, or at least how you interact with it. In what's essentially a modification of the iPod's touch wheel, the H10 uses a touch strip and two main buttons to navigate through menus and select options. Using your finger, you slide up and down on the strip to move up or down through menu selections and options. It's actually more intuitive than the iPod's wheel since you're going up and down rather than clockwise and counter-clockwise.

As well, you can tap on either the top or bottom of the touch strip to move up or down menu items, which actually works better when you're moving up or down a single selection. To select and option or folder, you press the O (circle) button to the right of the touch strip; to go back, you press the back arrow to the left.

Working through the interface with this setup is extremely easy and very fast. Like the iPod's jog wheel, the touch strip is speed-sensitive so you can easily scroll through a bunch of albums. As a reasonable guesstimate, while scrolling my finger at somewhat quick speeds, I could scroll through about a dozen folders in a single swipe of the strip. Obviously, you can't really just keep moving your finger like you can on the iPod since you need to pick up your finger and move it to the top of the strip again, though if you hold your finger at an end of the strip, folders and menus will continue to scroll after a short pause.


In order to play songs you use the player controls on the right side of the H10. There are play/pause, forward and reverse buttons located on the side. Once a track is playing, using the touch strip will change volume, pressing O will bring up the EQ menu and pressing the back arrow will take you back to the song list, though it doesn't pause the current track, which is nice.

Speaking of EQ settings, there are a literal ton of presets that come with the H10 as well as SRS WOW, the 3D-scape sound processor. Some of them sound reasonable, some not so reasonable, depending on what you're playing obviously, but I found myself setting the five-band EQ myself.

I personally like to have the EQ set up in a perfect "V" shape, with the center mix in the center, the bass and high-end all the way up, and the two remaining settings in between those. I listen to a lot of alternative-metal-type stuff (oh, how I hate classifying music), like Tool, The Mars Volta, Dredg, Deftones, etc. I like to really hear the kick drum and bass guitar rolling along while also getting plenty of bite from the upper registers.

And the iriver H10 delivered this aural treatment in spades. The unit sounds fantastic, and though a few online sites are claiming that the audio becomes distorted at high bass levels, I never found this to be the case. Actually, that's not entirely true; things can become distorted with the included headphones, but that's because they're crap. Included headphones are crap 99% of the time and any self-respecting music fan will pick up a decent set of cans anyway.

With my regular Sennheiser 212Pros, the H10 sounds excellent. Bass is deep and tight, highs are crisp and everything sounds well-defined. Again, unlike I've seen mentioned elsewhere, I had no problems whatsoever with bass distortion and as I said before, I crank the bass EQ all the way up. I listen to my music at a reasonably loud volume, a setting of 30 out of 40 on the H10, and it was flawless for me. Along with the touch strip, the H10's audio quality is one of my favorite aspects of the unit.