The iRiver H320 SE is a 20gb hard drive MP3 player with USB .20 connectivity and as such pitche3s it firmly against the Ipod 20gb, but there are a few extras in the iRiver shell that mean its aim may well be somewhere much higher, if you can put the 20gb capacity to one side just look at the fact it can store and display photos now that pitches it at the Ipod Photo just launch by apple.

Measuring 62 x 22 x 103mm the 320 is fairly compact and a good size for a portable device, it boasts a 260K colour 2" TFT screen through which all of the navigation and browsing is carried out, unlike its smaller brothers there is no inline LCD screen on this model. iRiver have taken the rather unusual step of actively calling this "Geek Tech" depending on your standpoint this is a good or bad thing but we're sure the demographics of a geek are profitable but sadly not many of us geeks actually want to be called one!

But the iRiver H320 SE does attract geeks and the main reason is its multi codec support, of course you can decode and even record MP3's (we'll get to that later) and play OSF / WMA but the real attraction for Geeks is the support of the Ogg Vorbis format which allows for greater compression while preserving sound quality. The H320 SE is one of the few devices on the market fully supporting the Ogg standard and due to the 320 appearing as a mounted hard disk device iRiver do away with complicated player management software and instead give you a explorer file interface for simple drop and drag operations, geek heaven we think.

Audio quality is first class with a good well weighted bass output and clear midrange and crisp top end vocals, the line output is at a good level to feed most HiFi systems and with something like a 192kb Ogg recording its tricky to tell it from a CD player, the supplied Sennheiser headphones are ok but as always we'd recommend an upgrade here.

The interface is certainly colourful and lends itself perfectly to photo viewing, simply connect to your camera via USB or download images from your PC to be able to browse them through the simple iRiver interface, they have done away with the little jog stick on earlier devices and gone with navigation buttons which work well but are a little slow to operate.

The FM tuner works well and allows direct encoding to MP3 files and acts as a backup should you have exhausted your 20gb of music and fancy a change, there is also a voice record capability but it is best to record in .wav format and change to MP3 once on your PC as the MP3 encoder on board is ok but not much better than ok.

The H320 SE is a real USB storage system, it will appear as a mounted drive to any windows PC (98me and above) and can therefore be paired with any PC unlike the Ipod which requires a re format, the real cleaver bit is the inbuilt USB 2.0 hub which allows the 320 to connect to a camera and display its contents and copy them over. The USB hub is also used as a charging method for the 1300 mAh lithium polymer battery which can keep the iRiver running for almost 16 hours on a full charge.

Downsides? well the styling is ok if a little boy racer, the carbon fibre effect trim makes it look like a high end ford escort with furry dice and at 183g its a heavy beastie too, plus we'd really like a dock included in the price? but then again even apple have stopped this on their 20gb model.

One fault we seem to have hit on is related to how many tracks you store, on initial test the H320 SE was like lightening, then we put some more tracks on and hit the 2000 mark and at that point boot up seemed to take an age almost a minute before it was ready to play, we can only assume the device reloads the ID3 database on boot up, once started everything is fine but it is annoying.

Priced at £229 the iRiver H320 SE is £10 more than the Ipod but has so much more to offer and if you can put aside the weight issue then this is a better bet, of course if you are a Geek then the Ogg Vorbis support would convince you to wheel a skip round strapped to two skateboards so there is no need to preach to the converted.

A word of warning if you do decide to get a H320 SE then ensure its a European version like those sold by our partners Amazon as the US version had the USB hub removed and much poorer headphones supplied so the price could be lowered to the same as the Ipod.

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