Can't quite remember who it was that sang "I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is giving a high five" but its possible that it should have been "I've got one gig in my pocket and the other one is adjusting my HiFi". Ok a poor start but you see LP has been under a bit of pressure in his day job and hasn't been taking his tablets this week.

But we have had the pleasure of being the temporary owners of the iRiver IFP 899 and this raised high hopes as we have yet to get a bad device from iRiver to test. The IFP 899 is a 1gb flash memory mp3 player which had just been launched to replace the ifp-300, in the style department the IFP 899 is worlds apart from the old model with a fresh, and one could say funky prism shape which in the deep red that our one was clad in made for a striking design.

Now a 1gb flash player is quite a useable size but that means that filling it up is still a regular requirement because you can't get all your mp3's onto it in one go, so expecting you to refill each week iRiver have endowed this new generation of players with the USB 2.0 standard meaning a throughput of 14.4 mb/s 4 times faster than a USB player using the older 1.0 standard.

So what do you put on an MP3 player where space is a premium? well how about Ogg Vorbis rather than MP3, the iRiver supports multi codec playback and we tried it with Ogg to see the difference in sound quality. A colleague of LP's swears by Ogg Vorbis and has encoded his whole collection at 192kbps  giving him the equivalent quality of a 256kbit mp3 file due to the more efficient encoding system.

With our Ogg files encoded at 96kbps and almost twice as many files squeezed on our iRiver, it has left us with that techie excitement of telling anyone who will listen about how you can fit 2gb of music into a 1gb player, yes you can see them running away now, making excuses, anything to escape geek type chat. But the serious point is that without this technology the IFP 899 would be mere canon fodder for the new Ipod mini.

But instead with an "effective" 2gb Ogg capacity the flash based player can really show its extra features and stability of replay in tough environments, like while jogging or on the move, places where hard disk players (even those with skip protection) can come up short with interrupted replay.

The lack of moving parts also contributes to a 40hr battery life from the single AA battery, much better than the new Apple Ipod 4G which can just about stretch to 12hrs on a full charge.

And then we get to the extras, things that many players (certainly Ipods) don't have, encoding is the first on the list, the iRiver boasts recording to MP3 via line in / built in microphone or from the onboard FM tuner. The FM radio can store your favourite stations within it's presets and can wake you with the radio as an alarm, even allowing timed recordings from the tuner while the unit is powered down!

All the features are accessible though a simple but classy GUI on the 4 line backlit display, driving the 899 is quite straight forward with the thumb operated joystick / button arrangement at the right hand side of the display.

Audio replay was very good especially on the Ogg codec with us having difficulty telling any difference between the MP3 of a song and the matching Ogg file, the FM radio was ok but we did suffer a bit with reception problems, possibly due to the aerial being in the headphone cable. Again we found that this iRiver product had poor quality headphones especially for the £269 asking price, quite why manufactures spend time and effort on good hardware and codec's only to stuff up the headphones we will never know, but still its easily remedied.

The 899 measures 88.5 x 36.2x 27.3mm and with battery weighs 65g which makes it very portable and ideal as a top pocket player, it's one of those devices that grew on us over a number of days to the point where we really quite liked it.

It's not an Ipod and despite the excellent styling and build quality you don't get that special feeling of a new Ipod Mini but that's about all that is missing from the package, at £159 the iRiver IFP 899 is not cheap and you will need to be making the most of its extra features to justify the price compared to the baby Ipod.

More iRiver Reviews

More MP3 Reviews -

[ Up ] [ iRiver IFP ] [ MuVo2 mini MP3 player ] [ Rio Nitrus ] [ Philips HDD070 ] [ Zen Micro Review ] [ Sony NW-E99 MP3 ] [ Aiwa HZWS2000 ] [ Rio Carbon Review ] [ iRiver IFP 899 ] [ iPod Nano Review ] [ Archos XS100 ] [ Samsung YP-U1Q ] [ Cowon iAudio 6 Review ] [ iAudio U3 Review ] [ Creative Zen V Plus ] [ Cowon iAudio F2 ] [ Oracom UB890 ] [ iPod Touch Review ] [ 3rd Generation iPod Nano ] [ Sony NWZA818 Review ] [ MobiBlu B153 ] [ New iPod Nano 2G Review ] [ iRiver S10 Review ] [ Sandisk Sansa E200 Review ] [ iRiver U10 Review ] [ iRiver H10 Review ] [ Sanyo HDP MM3000 ] [ Philips HDD084 Review ] [ MPIO HD200 Review ] [ M:Robe MR100 ] [ Monolith MP3 Player ] [ iRiver IFP-599T ] [ Ipod Mini Review ]