iriver clix 2 4GB MP3 Player Review

The overall appearance of the redesigned clix 2 is nothing but sleek. The front of the unit features no buttons or raised edges, just smooth curves, rounded corners and a glossy black bezel that focuses attention squarely upon the magnificent 2.2" AMOLED screen. To navigate through the clix's menus, one most simply press down on the edges of the display as if the entire screen were a D-Pad on a videogame controller. iriver calls this the D-Click system, and I can't get enough of it.

Holding the iriver Clix 2 in hand.

Dedicated buttons such as volume, power and the hold switch reside on the edges of the clix 2, along with the microphone, reset pinhole, mini-USB port and earphone jack. Next to the earphone jack on the backside of the clix is a small indent, presumably for using a pair of lanyard earphones similar to what was used with the iriver S10, although these are not currently available for purchase on iriver America's website. The USB port uses a standard Mini-B type connector, which is especially convenient for cable sharing, although it may potentially limit the number of accessories released for the clix 2.

Black dominates this generation of the clix, as the high-contrast white backside thankfully did not make an appearance. Instead the back is a matte black, which may look somewhat dull close up but adds to the overall appearance when viewed from a short distance. The earbuds and USB cable are also color matched, with small silver dimples in the earbuds for styling.

Comparing the thickness with nano.

iriver, where are all the navigation buttons?

Navigating the clix
Like the U10, E10, and clix gen 1 before it, the new clix 2 uses Adobe Flash Lite coupled with the revolutionary D-Click system for navigation. In any given menu, there will be arrows at each edge of the screen that indicate whether or not you may move in that direction. Up and down are used for scrolling, while clicking left moves back a menu and clicking right selects an item. Holding right on certain items acts as a submenu key, showing advanced options such adding a track to a quicklist, changing the EQ settings and playback speed, or giving a song a star rating.

While this may sound clumsy at first when compared to a dedicated set of navigation controls, it really isn't. Moving through long lists is hardly a chore thanks to accelerated scrolling, and two handy shortcuts exist for quickly moving between the two most common screens. Hold left from any screen to access the main menu, and hold right to quickly move to the now playing screen from most places. Also, there's a dedicated "smart button" on the side of the unit that can be set to the following options for even more efficiency: A-B repeat, home, play/pause, shuffle, display orientation, start/stop recording, and display on/off.

Backgrounds for the menus can be set to either Flash Lite themes or user photos for a customized and ever-fresh look. When using themes, it's possible to have the clix alternate the colors and designs according to the day of the week, or if there's a particular image within a theme that you wish to use, you can set that statically as well. For pictures, you can select either a specific 320x240 photo, or have it randomly select one for you. The clix 2 was designed to be used in landscape mode, although this can be changed to portrait mode for simpler one-handed control.

When in USB Mass Storage Mode, the clix 2 is meant to be used with the iriver plus 3 software, and while that does a good job of managing the clix for album art and videos, to be honest I've never really liked the program when it came to managing and playing back my massive music collection. Why? It lacks the ability to rip CDs to MP3s, can't playback streaming radio, minimize to a mini-remote window, create smart playlists, or entertain the eyes with a soothing visualizer.

Thankfully, iriver plus 3 is not required by any means to use the clix 2. Firmware can be updated via the standalone iriver Firmware Updater, while video conversion can be handled either with the bundled Movie Converter that converts to WMV for use with Windows Media Player 11 or drag-n-drop, or by using the traditional iriverter for lightweight MPEG-4 files to be copied over manually.

As far as the clix's database goes (browse by artist/album/song instead of filenames), it can thankfully be re-built directly on the clix 2 without the use of any software. Simply drag songs over or synchronize them with WinAmp or iTunes using the appropriate SyncTunes or iTunes Agent plugin. Once the songs are copied over, unplug the clix and select "Rebuild Database" from the advanced settings menu. Voila! An MP3 player that can be used with both the iTunes and Windows Media Player juggernauts, on any platform, without hassle. This is the way all MP3 players should be. And if for some strange reason you actually prefer browsing tracks by filename instead of ID3 tags, that's also an option for both UMS and MTP modes within the Advanced Settings menu.

Clix Music Playback
A wide array of music formats are supported on the Clix 2 depending on the connection mode you're using. For MTP users, WMA, MP3, and Audible content are all available and can be synchronized directly from Windows Media Player. Ogg Vorbis is also supported, although it must be dragged to the clix and browsed to manually. In UMS mode, WMA, MP3, and Ogg are all supported in the database, although Audible content will not be available.

As far as legally downloaded music support goes from services like Napster and URGE, both download and subscription tracks that are protected by Microsoft's Janus DRM-10 are supported, as the clix is a PlaysForSure device. Also, just recently a new 1.09 firmware was released by iriver that brings Real's Rhapsody service to the clix gen 2 for even more content choices. Now if only iriver would implement AAC support, we'd have access to the iTunes Music Store as well.

Once music is actually on the clix, there are a number of things you can do to enhance the listening experience. Album art is already displayed automatically (provided it shows up in Windows Media Player or iriver plus 3), but it's also possible to display lyrics in-sync to the song using iriver LDB manager. Likewise, it's also possible to rate the songs on-the-fly, create an on the go playlist, and change the playback speed of the song so it sounds artificially deep and slow, or peppy and fast.

While the bundled headphones sound tinny, there's a wealth of equalizers to choose from that compensate for this including 6 standard presets, a custom 5-band equalizer, and 5 SRS WOW settings to play with including SRS, TruBass, FOCUS, WOW, and Definition. It's also possible to enable a fade-in effect to smooth the transitions between songs. When hooked up to my car stereo and a quality pair of headphones, music was right on the mark without the need for adjustments. Bass, treble and midtones were all beautifully preserved without overpowering each other. Total battery life when listening at half-volume to MP3s with mixed bitrates between 128 and 192kbps was about 21.5 hours.

Radio and Recording
For the days when you don't want to be your own DJ, switch over to the clix 2's built-in FM radio and tune into your favorite stations. Three frequency ranges are available for using the clix in other countries, including Korea/USA, Japan, and Europe. The auto-scan feature can be a bit finicky, so be sure to have the earbuds propped up in order to save as many stations as possible on the first try. If it does miss a couple stations that it shouldn't have, those can be manually added later.

Holding down right while in the FM Radio screen will present options for recording what you're currently listening to, as well as changing the recording quality between low, medium, and high. Quick notes and bootlegs can also be recorded using the built-in microphone, although quality rips from vinyl and CDs are not possible since there's no line-in jack. Using the alarm clock, it's possible to schedule radio recordings for a specified channel as well as wake up to any station, recorded FM content, music files, or a series of built-in alarms including the infamous Reveille.

Pictures and Video
Like many other MP3 players on the market, the new clix 2 has the ability to display photos in a slideshow, complete with fade and wipe transitions. Only non-progressive JPEGs are supported, so be sure your pictures are in the right format before copying them over. Also, it helps to have your pictures properly rotated to fit in a 320x240 window, as the clix does not automatically rotate pictures to make the best use of its viewable area.

What sets the clix 2 apart however is its gorgeous 2.2" Active Matrix OLED display, which makes everything appear far more vibrant than a traditional OLED display, while using less battery power than a standard LCD would. Imagine incredibly bright images with good contrast, a wide viewing angle, and smooth transitions between dark colors and you have the clix gen 2's display. I'm not kidding either; this is the best screen I've seen on a lightweight MP3 player to date. Unfortunately the pictures I've been taking don't do the screen justice.

The new clix 2's video functionality has also been greatly improved upon over the previous version. Both WMV and MP4 video are supported, with framerates up to 30fps. Considering the previous generations only went up to 15frames per second, action sequences suddenly appear so much smoother on the clix 2 that it can actually be used for more than just cartoons now, especially considering the quality of the AMOLED display. In my testing, total playback time for high quality video ended up at 5.5 hours, which is plenty of time to watch a couple TV shows and still have enough juice left over for music.

As mentioned previously, iriver finally got their act together and shipped not just one, but two video converters with the new clix, so non-computer savvy users and gift recipients can convert video without even having to search Google like they would with earlier iriver players. If you're using Windows Media Player 11 for synchronization, use iriver Movie Converter, which can do batch conversions overnight. If you're using iriver plus 3, video conversion is built right in. For Windows drag-n-drop, WinAmp or iTunes users, you can use either of the two (I'd recommend Movie Converter), or iriverter, which also works on Mac and Linux. A fair warning to those using Movie Converter however, your computer may act sluggish when converting video. To fix this, open the task manager and under the processes tab, right click MovieConverter.exe and change the priority to Below Normal.

iriver finally bundles Movie Converter with the new Clix!

Extras
As if all the above features weren't enough, the new iriver clix can display plaintext files, great for quickly looking up some directions or checking the grocery list. Contacts and calendars aren't supported, although you could always copy those into a text file and view them that way. When viewing text, the font size can be set to small, medium or large, and the clix can also auto-scroll to make things that much simpler.

The last major selling point for the clix's large display are the free games that can be played using the D-Click system, perfect for killing time in a waiting room. Five games are already loaded: Barn Baron, Log Jam, Sudoku, a Frogger clone and a Space Invaders clone. More free games can be downloaded from iriver America's website.

Synchronization Speeds
To test the new clix's transfer speed, I copied over a high quality conversion of Peter Jackson's King Kong (688MB) to the 4GB player using Windows Explorer. The transfer took 2m:20s to complete, which averages out to 39.4Mbps, roughly twice the write speed of the iriver U10 and also ahead of the 2nd generation iPod nano.

When it comes to music transfers, it took 42 minutes to fully load the clix with 707 songs totaling 3.7GB using Windows Media Player 11's "Shuffle Music" feature. This breaks down to roughly 12Mbps, which itself is rather poor and barely above USB 1.1's 11Mbps transfer rate. The lesson to be learned from this is that videos transfer quickly, while loading a bunch of songs mandates coffee and doughnuts. Of course, it's rare that I end up fully loading my MP3 players, typically dragging over only one or two new albums per day, so I'm not bothered too much by these lackluster speeds.

Recap
Simple navigation, killer sound quality, smooth video, vibrant photos and the brightest, most vivid display I've ever seen on an MP3 player put the new iriver clix 2 ahead of the competition in most regards. Free games, FM radio and text capabilities sweeten the deal, but what really sets the clix apart is its ability to operate in either MTP or USB Mass Storage modes with automated database rebuilding. At last, the freedom to switch between Rhapsody, Windows Media Player, WinAmp, iTunes, Mac and Linux without hassle. The only things that could really use improvement are the transfer speeds for music and the bundled headphones. Still, the clix gen 2 is highly recommended, and finally succeeds in stealing the limelight away from the current market leader.

By Scott Clark, Consumer Technology Editor