Last year I bought an iRiver T60 flash-based mp3 player, with 4Gb internal memory. It costed me something around 80 euros, but you can surely find a better price nowadays (in my price there was also included the shipping tax (which was quite big) and some other value-added tax).
In my opinion the player is just great. For the low price it provides a large amount of space for your music, an excellent audio quality (enhanced not only by the very good sound processor, but also by the strongly built headphones and the built-in SRS-WOW processor).
The connection to the computer is made using the player’s mini-USB port and the supplied cable. Depending on how the player is configured, the T60 device appears in Windows as a USB mass storage device or as a special device (but which provides the same capabilities and speed as the USB mass storage configuration). The player can also be connected to Mac computer, although I haven’t tested this functionality.
The case
The first thing that one notices about this player (and one of the many things that I like about this player) is its case and shape. Looking very similar to a reduced box of Toblerones, it creates a nice impression and clearly stands above the largely populated crowd of rectangular players. The case is beautifully crafted, with
nice combinations of smooth triangular surfaces (on each side) and beveled stripes on the rest of the case.
The equipment
The player has a built-in microphone (for voice recordings), a standard 3.5” jack for headphones on one of the triangular sides, 3 buttons on the side above the screen, a lock switch on the side below the screen and a 4-ways joystick.
The features
Besides the MPEG 1/2/2.5 Layer 3, WMA, ASF, OGG player, the T60 device can also play radio (providing a very intuitive interface for auto or manually scanning for radio stations and managing them using the 20 available memory slots) and create voice or live-radio recordings. There is also a (weird) feature for viewing BMP files, but you can just ignore this one, since it is really useless, given the small screen and the reduced number of colors.
The screen and the user interface
The screen is nothing fancy, just a CSTN display that outputs 65.000 bright colors. However it provides the exact amount of information required for navigating through your songs, pick the ones you like and listen.
The user interface requires only a few minutes to learn how to use it. One interesting fact about iRiver players is that for each one of them, the company created a separate interface. This might be considered a negative thing (i.e. the company should stick to one interface and implement that interface in all the players, so that the users don’t have to learn a new interface for each new player they buy) but in my opinion this is one of the great things about iRiver. Each player they have provides a different feeling, which is encompassed by its interface.
The player can operate in one of the 5 modes, and each mode has its own screen color for dialogs:
- blue color – mp3/wma/asf/ogg playing mode
- green color – browse mode (where you can navigate through the folders and delete the files you no longer need)
- magenta color – radio mode
- red color – recordings mode (listen and manage recordings)
- blue color – setup mode
The sound quality
Configured properly, the player outputs an excellent sound, turning the whole music listening activity in a delightful experience. Although the player provides 10 equalizer presets and one custom equalizer configuration, I personally prefer the SRS mode, which gives you a finer control on how the sound is post-processed and how it sounds in the headphones. You will also notice that if you use the SRS mode, you will have to find the proper configuration for the headphones that you use, given the fact that one configuration might sound perfect on a headphone set, and awful on a different one.
The headphones supplied with the player are strong and built very good. On a trip in Hannover, Germany I bought another set of small headphones, the Sennheiser MX460. The difference between these headphones and those supplied by iRiver was very small, so I must say that I completely enjoy listening to music using T60′s native headphones.
The battery (AAA)
The player is guaranteed to resist 19 hours of continuous playback of 128Mhz mp3 songs, with the volume set on 20 (out of 40, which is max). From my experience this evaluation is realistic, given the fact that the playback duration can be increased by lowering the volume to 18 (this is the level where I keep it, and I can assure you that it is loud enough) and use rechargeable batteries with a high value for mAh (I use a Sony AAA Rechargeable 1000mAh). Moreover, it is very unlikely you will listen to uninterrupted 19 hours of music, so the battery will resist much longer, since it has time to recover and restore a small amount of the consumed energy.
The bad points
The iRiver T60 is not perfect (what device is? 
), although its weak points are only a few. The biggest problem that it has is that it (heavily) consumes the battery while transferring music. Once or twice it died while transferring music (and if you don’t use a USB 2.0 port, copying 4Gb of music on it will take some time). That’s why I always use a fully recharged battery when transferring music on it.
Another weak point of iRiver T60 (and especially for the 4Gb model) is that it has a very slow speed when reading memory. This results in aprox. 20-25 seconds required for starting the player (with the 4Gb memory fully occupied) and again aprox. 15-20 seconds for deleting a file using the player’s browse mode. However this happens very rarely, so it is not so big deal.
Regarding the joystick, many reviews mention it as another weak point. Indeed, the joystick is somehow difficult to operate, being delicate. You can easily move it up or down while actually wanting to move it to left or right. However, this occurs VERY rarely, and it just a matter of getting used to it.
The conclusion
If it wasn’t clear enough, I completely love this player. It provides me with a large amount of space for my music, excellent high-quality sound, long battery lifetime and a nice and impressive case. All of this at a great price.