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| Meet E10 6GB MP3 player, less than a year old from South Korea. Born of iriver components, it loves to charm users with its flash interface and soothing music. In its spare time, the E10 enjoys listening to the radio, taking dictations, reading, playing games, watching movies, and changing channels on the TV. Interested? View the E10's full profile below. | ||
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Review Verdict
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Essential Specs & Stats
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Classical Design The E10's design departs from the funkier designs of previous iriver models to return to the ergonomically friendly and easy to carry rectangular form factor. Underneath the vibrant 128x128 color display are four oversized arrow buttons for navigation and playback control, as well as two clear jewel buttons for power and the smart key commonly used functions. Lining up with the thumb on the right side is the volume button, and on the left next to where your index finger is the hold switch. The fact that the buttons line up so well with your natural hand positioning (for righties anyway) shows iriver's attention to detail, and should help with day to day use.   From left to right, Creative Zen Micro 5GB, iriver E10 6GB, Apple iPod nano 4GB. Like the U10 before it, the E10 uses Macromedia Flash Lite 2.0 as the interface, with only directional four buttons to navigate the entire interface. Icons will appear on-screen to show you which directions you may navigate, or what the buttons will remap to, such as play/pause for the right button when viewing the current song. Shortcuts can also be used to minimize diving through menus, such as holding the right button to automatically go to the "Now Playing" screen, and the Smart Key may be programmed to one of five functions. Because the interface is based on flash, users may create their own (or download through iriver's Korean site) themes, that will automatically change for each day of the week. Out of the box there are three themes to pick from: Basic (polka dot), Fun (zebra stripes, cherries, etc), and Heidi, which is perhaps the best of the bunch, utilizing moving backgrounds with cute animals walking across the horizon. Alternatively, one may upload their own custom photos to the device and select those as wallpapers.  In case you haven't noticed from the pictures yet, the E10 6GB has a built-in infrared blaster for controlling the television. iriver includes support for over 150 brands including themselves for controlling the U10's dock. Another note, it seems that LodgeNet televisions commonly found in motel rooms are also supported. Once a brand has been selected, one can keep pressing down to cycle through the codes, while the E10 emits a Power signal through each code. As soon as the target television turns on or off, just select the code that worked, and from that point on as soon as you flip the hold switch you'll be able to remotely adjust the volume, change the channel, power on/off, and mute the TV.   Throughout my testing in Circuit City and Wal-Mart as well as at home and work, I found that the E10 worked with a large percentage of TVs including flat screens, however it would not work with a majority of the combo TV/VCR/DVD units, a few Magnavox and RCA units (although the majority of those worked) nor my Motorola cable box. A few smaller brands such as ilo and Durabrand, and surprisingly even Polaroid were not listed, although they might have worked had I tried going through all the codes for the other 100+ brands since some companies use the same codes. Unfortunately, there's no ability to add custom remote control codes, nor is there a learning capability. Unless iriver plans on publishing additional codes through firmware releases, if the E10 doesn't work with a set now, it probably never will.
Still, the fact that the E10 6GB doubles as a remote control is an interesting concept. While at first I thought it was a gimmick feature, now that I've carried the E10 wherever I've been for the past two weeks, I've noticed how useful it can be. Changing the channel from soap operas and depressing news broadcasts in waiting rooms makes life that much easier, and the ability to covertly annoy your friends and the general public by turning off the TV in the middle of an important broadcast can result in hilarious results, so long as they don't mangle you afterwards. :)
Music SynchronizationUnlike previous iriver devices I've reviewed, the E10 player is only available (for now) in UMS format and not MTP, which comes with its pros and cons. On the plus side, you're not restricted to using Windows Media Player to transfer files, nor are you restricted to using Windows XP. The drive acts as a USB Mass Storage Device, and shows up on Mac OS X and Linux for use as a portable hard drive. Music can also be transferred to the media player by drag-n-drop, however as of press time there is no software capable of writing to the E10's internal database, so music must be browsed to manually and cannot be sorted by album or artist, rated, added to playlists etc. unless it was transferred using the iriver plus 2 software. This is the E10's biggest downfall, because iriver plus 2 is a horrible piece of software that feels unresponsive and lacks many of the features present in other players like Winamp, iTunes, and Windows Media Player. However, previous MP3 players from iriver such as the H10 and U10 have been reverse engineered so that databases could be updated using EasyPMP or EasyH10 on any platform, so it's quite possible that the E10 may be supported in the future.      When commanding tracks on the road, it is possible to add groups of songs to a "Quick List" or the queue by holding the right button on a selected item, or even rate songs so that playlists by rating can be created on-the-fly. Other cool tricks are the ability to change the speed of playback (I couldn't stop laughing when listening to Mudvayne's Happy on -3 speed and SoaD's Question! on +5) and change the scan speed for fast forwarding. There's also the option to view lyrics, although I couldn't get this to work for the life of me.
The fact that iriver (as usual) didn't have any documentation on this advanced feature didn't help, and is something they seriously need to work on in the future. Another setback, there's no support for album art on the E10. And while I wasn't able to reach the claimed 32 hours of playback time, I was able to get close, the player finally dying after 28 hours of continuous playback at a moderately high volume level.
When you're not feeling up to being your own DJ, there's always the FM radio to keep the tunes pumping. Up to 20 presets can be defined either on the device, although users who already know the channels they want to program will find it quicker to set the channels using the iriver plus 2 software. There is also an auto-preset function that scans the airwaves and automatically marks channels with a good signal, although those in large metropolis areas such as the Los Angeles counties will find that auto-preset fills all 20 channels before even scanning the entire FM range.
Sounds produced by the E10 6GB are exceptionally clean if not a little lacking in bass on the Normal setting, and there are plenty of quality EQ settings to choose from by holding the Right button within the Now Playing screen, including Classic, Live, Pop, Rock, Jazz, Ubass, Metal, Dance, Party, Club, Custom EQ, and SRS WOW, the latter two of which can be further customized within the Settings > Sounds menu. The Custom EQ is your basic 5-band equalizer with 10 steps in each band, while the SRS WOW allows customization of the SRS, TruBass, FOCUS, and WOW settings. It's easiest to just play around with them and find something that suits you best rather than try to explain it. It should be noted that EQ settings don't apply to FM or videos. Additionally, a Fade-In option is available and enabled by default for smooth transitions into songs, FM radio, and movies.
Movie PlaybackGreat for showing off those funny clips or watching TV shows when you're bored, iriver's E10 can play video on it's 128x128 color LCD. And like the U10 before it, iriver once again failed to provide any documentation as to how to compress videos to comply with the single format that the E10 will accept. So while you may not want to try walking your technologically-impaired relatives through this, the following steps will get you running in about 2 minutes.
 Once on the E10, videos can be played, paused, resumed, fast forwarded and rewound through, and similarly named videos (e.g. clonewars_01.avi and clonewars02.avi) can be played back sequentially without manually changing videos. Due to the 15 frame-per-second limitation present on the player, action sequences occasionally appear choppy, although most TV shows and animation look decent. The E10 lasted just over 9 hours playing King Kong in a loop, so you shouldn't worry about battery life, but god help you if you can actually stare at the tiny screen that long, let alone for 3 hours.
Eye Candy In addition to blasting your eardrums, the E10 6GB can also entertain your eyes with pictures. Standard JPEGs with an image size of 128x128 or less can be transferred to the player for quick viewing. However, like music these need to be transferred using the iriver plus 2 software in order to view pictures from the main menu, otherwise they need to be browsed to manually. Pictures that have been uploaded through iriver plus 2 however may be viewed in a slideshow while MP3s are playing, with options to adjust the time between slides and the transition effect used between them. Pictures displayed on screen were nice and vibrant, however like many smaller LCDs there was a distinct pixilation effect surrounding darker colors.
If you're keen on taking notes or saving directions, the E10 can display plaintext files that have been dropped into the E10's text directory. Upon viewing, one may change the autoscroll speed and font size. A small progress bar at the bottom of the screen tells you how far into the document you are.
E10 Extras  Following along in its sibling's footsteps, the E10 supports recording from the small pinhole microphone, as well as recording radio broadcasts off the air to be played back later. Other notable features include an alarm clock that can be set to quick intervals or specific times with the option wake you to one of several alarm sounds, an MP3, or the radio. It can also be used to schedule FM recordings on a predefined channel. The duration and volume of the alarm can also be defined.
Got a few minutes to kill? You can play any of the number of flash games created for the E10. iriver ships the player with 3 games out of the box, including Mine Sweeper, a Slide Puzzle that tears apart your photos, and Tracking (Milton Bradley's Simon). Additional games and themes may be downloaded from iriver's Korean website, but be warned that there's no English version of the page and a few of the E10-labeled files I downloaded didn't work. Do note that U10 games do work, although only a few such as Tetris are actually playable due to the smaller screen size. I imagine that as time progresses there will be more E10-ready games and themes available to download from iriver fansites such as MisticRiver.net.
QuirksRight now I'm using my second E10. The first was a store display model, and as such had a lot of MP3s and junk pre-loaded. What was strange about the first one was that it would not show up under Mac OS X or Linux, claiming to be improperly formatted despite it being FAT32. While initializing the player using iriver plus 2 (version 2.6.4.1) fixed that problem, I was left with a new one far more severe - the E10's interface refused to re-analyze the file system, so I could not play any music files that were transferred to it. They could not be browsed to either, as the Browse Device function simply said that my player was empty when it really wasn't. In the Pictures section, I somehow acquired over 4,000 blank JPEGs with unreadable characters, even though there were really no photos in the Pictures directory. No matter how many times I formatted the drive in Windows or iriver plus 2, nor how many times I recreated the database in iriver plus 2, the player simply would not function properly again, even after opening it up and disconnecting the battery. Ultimately, the E10 had to be RMA'ed. As such, take this in fair warning; avoid initializing your player at all costs. Recap Overall the E10 6GB is an excellent choice for an MP3 player. It's easy to grip and navigate, has an impressive battery life, sounds amazing, and the FM/recorder/video/photo/text/game/USB Mass Storage Device support allows it to be used in so many ways throughout everyday life. The built-in remote control is rather handy for those stuck in waiting rooms, although users with cable boxes won't be able to change channels and those using unsupported televisions may be left in the dark indefinitely. The only major downsides are the small screen for viewing video, restriction of using iriver plus 2 to synchronize music, and lack of documentation on a few of the more advanced features. Regardless, the iriver E10 is highly recommended to those looking for a slim and capable player. By Scott Clark, Consumer Technology Editor |
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