iRiver E100 8GB review

You'll either love or hate the chocolate brown colour of iRiver's E100, but thankfully it's also available in black or pink.

We were pleasantly surprised at the quality of the included earphones. They sounded rich and detailed and produced particularly clear vocals. The treble can sound harsh so the earphones aren't flawless, but they're perfectly good.

The E100's interface is logically organised, so it's easy to navigate. The functions of the four-way directional buttons when playing music felt counterintuitive. On most of the players here with similarly arranged buttons, pressing the left button skips back to the previous track while pressing the right button skips forward to the next track. On the E100, these functions are assigned to the up and down buttons, while the left and right buttons are used to return to the previous menu and switch play modes.

Videos don't look their best on the E100's grainy screen and we were unimpressed with the bundled video-conversion software, which often crashed under Vista but worked fine under XP. Videos resume playing from where you left off on the E100. The battery lasted nearly six hours before running out when playing video, which is among the better times here. The battery lasted just over 20 hours when playing music, which is respectable, but other players here lasted twice as long.

Extra features include an FM radio, which you can record directly to the memory, but we were unimpressed with its static-prone reception. You can record live audio using the E100's integrated microphone or an external mic plugged into the line-in port. There's a Micro SD card slot for adding more storage.

Although we were frustrated by its fiddly controls, the E100 is a decent MP3 player. Unfortunately, it's outclassed by the other 8GB players here. Philips' cheaper 8GB GoGear lasted longer in our battery test and has less frustrating controls.