iRiver – so many functions

For my birthday I got an iRiver H340. This is a wonderful machine. It’s known in the market as an mp3 player. But it does so much more. It can store 40 GBs of data – that can be mp3s, photos, text (eBooks), data and even videos. It has a colour screen so that you can watch videos. It took a few days to figure out how to do this – once you get there it is fantastic!

It also has an FM radio in it, which you can record from as an mp3 file. And you can record through either an internal microphone or an external clip microphone. All of which means that I am getting closer to producing my first podcast. The storage capacity of this machine is breath-taking.

The official site is here. I have to say that the machine itself may be fantastic, but the manual and accompanying information is useless. The first 24 hours of trying to figure out how everything worked was incredibly frustrating. Nothing seemed to make any sense. This was only rescued by an amazing online forum where iRiver users post questions and answers. It is called misticriver. There are some incredibly informed users on this site. It was here that I learnt how to get video working on the machine. I also learnt some of the basic functions of the machine which the manual should have told me.

So, it is a fantastic machine, which makes the iPod look like a lame fashion icon. But the iRiver out of the box lacks user-friendliness. You need a willingness to become a bit of a geek to understand the real capacity of the iRiver. It’s worth the learning curve though for the sheer range of things that this small gadget can deliver!