iRiver U10 review

Taste is an individual thing, but we doubt many people would accuse the sleek U10 of being ugly.

Nor are its controls clunky, as those of so many MP3 players sadly are - in fact you'd be forgiven for thinking that iRiver had forgotten to fit any controls at all.

The player has a power switch, volume buttons and a sliding keylock, but nothing else. Switching the iRiver on, however, reveals four directional arrows on the screen. These can be used to scroll through the U10's menus and playlists. Each menu page has a list of options on either side of the screen telling you what will happen when you use each of the arrow icons.

The U10's crisp screen displays good clean images, and there's enough contrast and colour range to make watching videos enjoyable. The U10 can play AVI and MPEG-4 videos, but if you have video files in another format, you'll have to find converter software somewhere else as none is supplied. Supported audio formats include MP3, WMA and best of all, protected WMA files. Paid-for music download services such as Napster use protected WMA files, but lots of other MP3 players can't play them.

The U10 can also display JPEG photo files, so you'll be able to delight friends and family with your holiday snaps no matter where you are. Sound quality is excellent and we really liked the bundled Sennheiser headphones - much better than those you get with most MP3 players. And if you get bored of your own music, you can always use the U10's FM radio tuner. The iRiver's battery life was also excellent - 20 hours in our tests, which is six hours longer than the iPod nano.

Unlike most other serious MP3 players, the U10 uses flash memory rather than a miniature hard disk. Unsurprisingly, given just how expensive flash chips are, the iRiver only has a relatively small storage capacity of 1GB. This is a shame, as it's otherwise it's otherwise a very good media player.