The iRiver PMP 120 is one of the first portable media players to hit the UK market both iRiver and Archos have been talking up the arrival of PMC's powered by a Microsoft OS in the next few months, but for now the best PMP experience you can get is sold by iRiver and is based on a Linux OS.

Our time with the PMP 120 proved to be an interesting day, the outward impressions of the device are good with a sturdy and stylish design if not the most imaginative thing we've ever seen, its basically a screen with controls either side to navigate the GUI. The 3.5 inch TFT LCD (QVGA) 320X240 screen looks good enough but for some reason we half expected it to be a touch screen as this would seem logical for a device like this but it isn't and we soon got used to toggling around with the joystick and the 4 selection buttons on the right-hand of the screen.

The 20gb iRiver PMP 120 should be good to hold about 80 hours of video at 500kbps encoded rate and some 600 hours of music recorded in WMA format at 64kbps, video is smooth with only minor artefacts during playback and the unit can display AVi or ASF file formats using DivX 3.11, 4.0, 5.x, XviD and MPEG-4 SP. The maximum video bit rate of 1.5mbps running at the highest supported resolution (640 x 480) produced some excellent results which were only let down by the low resolution of the display screen.

While the gadget loving side of the team loved the video replay you've got to remember that this is easily achieved on almost any laptop and now most PDA's so the choice of such a low resolution screen in the PMP 120 seems a bad decision but is driven as much by power consumption as by image quality.

The PMP 120 ran for over 5 hours during video replay and the latest firmware available from iRiver for the 120 extends this further to about 6.5 hours, the battery is rechargeable and also replaceable learning from the lessons of the Ipod fiasco.

Loading the PMP-120 is easy enough and a quick affair with USB 2.0 connectivity which also allows the device to connect to a wide range of PC's and digital cameras, we successfully connected a Fuji Digital camera to the 120 and downloaded our images for viewing and storage.

For audio tests we used MP3 @ 128kbits as that's the format of LP's library, the sound quality was good and on a par with most of the leading MP3 players, its a lot easier to navigate with a good size colour screen and play list editing / creation actually becomes a possibility with a decent interface. The built in speaker isn't up to much so you'll be wanting to use headphones for all but the quiets of rooms or when you are showing off to some friends! We managed to squeeze 11 hours of audio replay out of the iRiver's battery by not using the screen and leaving a long play list running, so it does seem to outgun even the 4G Ipod on that count.

Extras include an FM tuner and a voice recorder both of which work fine but are nothing much to wrote home about, iRiver make great claims for the units external connectivity and sure you can connect to your TV but at 320 x 240 its not going to be a home cinema experience and does look more like a gimmick than a real saleable feature. You can record direct audio from an external source or the FM tuner, which is a nice touch but perhaps support of Ogg Vorbis may have been in order?

Overall this is a competent first portable media player from iRiver, the 120 does the job its asked to do and has a good user interface, smooth video replay and excellent audio credentials, but we can't help wondering if this is like the first MP3 players that weren't really sure how they would be used.

The PMP 120 is a device that's possibly ahead of the technological curve and it suffers form a lack of direction, its all things to all men and has to make do with the available screen technology, iRiver should take real credit in showing where we are going and what we will all be buying, but unless you must have it now perhaps version 2 of the £350 PMP-120 would be worth waiting for?

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