No E100 love?

[Underscored]

I'm not sure if it's because you guys are more into the prosumer end of iRiver products.. but the E100 is on sale now in a few places.

Anyone getting one? I'm awaiting reviews on battery life and the build quality. Looks a little plasticy and maybe the buttons suck but a bit but the price is very good.

I don't like .wma, when you record from FM can you set it record in other formats? How long will Rock Box E100 take and what features would it add?

[jeff]

The E100 will hit the shelves officially in the U.S. at the end of March, beginning of April. Pricing should be excellent (not known yet) and build quality should be good as well. With the addition of FLAC and a microSD slot, the E100 could prove a viable option for many.

We'll keep you posted.

[Step666]

Originally Posted by Underscored

I'm awaiting reviews on battery life...

It ain't looking wondrous.
It's only rated at 17 hours, which is pretty low for a flash-based DAP of that size - for comparison, the similarly-sized Sony A820 is rated at 36 hours, more than twice as much.

Still, the features-to-price ratio is really quite excellent, so it looks as though it'll be a pretty good player.

[clinton]

Originally Posted by Step666

It ain't looking wondrous.
It's only rated at 17 hours, which is pretty low for a flash-based DAP of that size - for comparison, the similarly-sized Sony A820 is rated at 36 hours, more than twice as much.

Still, the features-to-price ratio is really quite excellent, so it looks as though it'll be a pretty good player.

Exactly, I wish battery lift will be better but 17 hours is enough for me. Any review available?

[Step666]

No.
The player isn't available yet.

[clieos]

Originally Posted by Step666

No.
The player isn't available yet.

Not to the West officially at least. Currently only iriver Korea/ HK are selling E100, but it will come to the U.S. and E.U. late this month.

Also, I want to point out that the battery might not be as bad as it seems because iriver has change its method of testing from standard vol 20 to vol 20~32. If you are like me, which volume is generally set between 10~14, that is a good chance the it will last over 20hrs.

[Underscored]

Review: Review: Iriver E100 : Akihabara News .com
5 colors (white, black, pink, light blue and chocolate). With only 59 grams and 11.3mm of thickness, it can easily be transported.

25 hours battery life for audio now.

Plus:
+ Excellent audio quality
+ D-Click system
+ MicroSD port
+ MTP/UMS (the player is detected as an external drive)
+ Price to quality ratio
+ All around player (Audio, Vidoo, Photo, Text, FM radio, voice recorder)
+ Design

Minus:
- No Bluetooth
- Autonomy in Video mode (5 hours)
- D-Click sometimes lacks reactivity

D-Click kinda sucks, it's not for video really. I might get one.

[MatmaN]

I had an oportunity to play with e100 for a while today. It is a really nice player, sounds really good, with clear but not intrusive [?] bass and some really nice vocals. It sounds rarher bright to me, but my opinion here is not quite reliable, because I only had about 20 minutes to play around with it and I didn't have my music with me. Although I still say that it is pleasant to the ear and a good sounding player. D-click works fine and is more intuitive [is it the right word? ] than I expected, menu is very good (although it took me some time to find EQ settings), clear and easy to navigate using d-click. Also it's exterior makes a good impression, looks solid, doesn't make any crackling noises while beeing squeezed. Since it's cheaper than other models I consider it as almost "must have" for this price. I'm looking for an oportunity to compare it with clix2 to check the SQ [for wich clix2 is rather glorified... I guess]. One thing I didn't like about it was quite loud noise heard during pause [I used my westone UM1], defenetely louder then in my iAudio7.

[Underscored]

Do iRivers do gapless playback? What's the UI like, is it Artist > Album > Song and similar?
How is the podcast support?

[arnstein]

Recent iriver products have a built-in ID3/WMA tag database, which means you can browse by Artist/Album/Genre/Song. The database is updated with the tag information from each song (mp3/wma/… file) on the player. Some iriver players (E10, for example) require special software to be able to update the database (typically iriver Plus 3).

I have recently used a Sony NWZ-S616 mp3 player. This player doesn’t need any proprietary software to transfer music (or video) to the player. I just drag and drop files to the Music folder on the device, and when the player is disconnected from the PC, it automatically rebuilds the internal tag database. This is really convenient!

Does anyone know if E100 needs iriver Plus 3 to be able to update its tag database?

[jeff]

Originally Posted by arnstein

Does anyone know if E100 needs iriver Plus 3 to be able to update its tag database?

It does not... you can drag and drop to the player via windows explorer and the database will update automagically.

It also uses the same connection type settings as the clix 2. You can select UMS(MSC) or MTP.

[tchariya]

Wow..finally a new product from iRiver that will eventually do 16GB+ (with add-on flash). This thing is sexy...but honestly not as sexy as an iPod...but i'd give up all that sexiness for control over my music and superior audio reproduction...oh and FM tuner...and recorder. I don't really care about video anymore.

Yes, I prefer to carry all my music with me wherever I go, but now to just drag and drop and sort on a flash card my different types of music is even that much better. No loss of data due to HD crashing or battery dying..or whatever...portable flash!

I hope someone puts out a bunch of accessories for this player! I really don't want to carry my H320 or a brick DAP anymore.

[Judge]

The E100 is definitely available in the Netherlands. It's in stock.

[BBD]

The only thing I hate (so far) is the card and internal memory are treated as separate, not integrated. Fer the love, Sandisk has that right! Any chance that's fixable in a FW upgrade?

[jeff]

yes, a firmware update could take care of it.

[Underscored]

I hope they do, but then again I'm one of those people who downloads huge 4gb packages of music I've never heard of for when I'm in the mood. I could just whack all that random shit on the flash card and have my regular tunes on the iRiver.

But that really isn't everyone's listening habits.

[Rafterman]

Originally Posted by Underscored

Review: Review: Iriver E100 : Akihabara News .com

25 hours battery life for audio now.


.

Problem with this is I have yet to come across any PMP/DAP ect where the battery life as stated by the manufacturer bore any resemblence to the battery life obtained by the end user.

[Step666]

Yeah, manufacturer's specs are rarely true but the Akihabara battery life is actual tested performance from when they reviewed the E100.

[Underscored]

Pocketables corroborate 25 audio 5 video, they say the screen is pretty poor compared to the clix 2, but acceptable.

Speakers are tinny, the SD support is poor and the sound quality isn't that fantastic (in their opinion) compared to something like the Gigabeat.

"Good but not great"
YouTube - iriver E100 demo
Review: iriver E100

I'm sort of willing to forgive the screen and speakers as it is an economy player compared to the clix2 but if someone else reports less than stellar sound quality I might skip it.

[Step666]

The speakers were always going to be tinny and whilst it's a shame about the MicroSD implementation, they're not the only manufacturer who's screwed up like that.

As for sound quality, it's really too subjective a matter just to go on a couple of reviews for.
Ok, yeah, they say it's poor (for an iRiver product, which is a pretty high standard to begin with) but who says that means it's so poor you'd be unhappy with it?
Your best bet is, if you can, to try it and see for yourself.

[Underscored]

washingtonpost.com

The same cannot be said for music playback. Anything with lots of bass or percussion produced unpleasant buzzing effects at higher volume. The buzzing didn't go away when I switched to high-end earbuds, so I don't fault the uncomfortable set bundled with the unit. Corroborating my observations, the E100 earned a score of 70 on the PC World Test Center's signal-to-noise ratio tests (where a higher number means a cleaner signal); of the players we've tested recently, onlythe Archos 105did worse.

My biggest complaints about the E100, though, involve its unintuitive user interface. The way to toggle between loop and continuous play modes, for example, was not obvious; and I also couldn't figure out how to turn off the FM radio. The 46-page manual bundled with the device proved helpful, but not many buyers will have the patience to leaf through it, and many of the E100's features should be more readily accessible.

iRiver makes some slick and stylish portable music and media players, but the E100 isn't at the top of the list. Between its unprepossessing industrial design, ho-hum audio, and difficult user interface, I didn't find much to recommend it.

No dice iRiver. I'll have to get a Zune or a different iRiver.

[AndyisFrozen]

i bought the U10 like 5 milllion years ago, and apparently it has aprx. 34hr of battery life, which is awesome, Battery life isnt my biggest concern, i listen to it about 2-3hrs a day maybe more, so it wouldn't bother me, well could someone tell me the Spec upgrades between a U10 to a E100 and the comparison between a E100 and Clix2? SQ is probably at the top of my list, the SQ of the U10 vs the E100