iriver X20 8GB MP3 Player Review

On the backside of the unit you'll find two additional PMP similarities that I wish would be implemented in more DAPs: a door housing the removable Li-Ion battery, and two small speakers for entertaining friends or simply listening to music without earbuds. Replacement batteries will run you about $25 when purchased online.

The backside and edges of the iriver X20 player are made from a really lightweight plastic, which feels great in a pocket but somewhat cheap and not as durable as a few of the other players on the market. The front of the unit is a high gloss black that's highly attracted to fingerprint smudges, but maintains a sexy appeal nonetheless.

Connections are housed on the right side of the unit next to the controls, and include a standard headphone jack in the center and a line-in jack at the corner. A standard mini-USB jack is also present, so there's no need for proprietary cables. The one disadvantage to the headphone jack being placed next to the controls though is that unless you can read sideways, it can be hard to get a firm grip on the player when it's hooked up to the car stereo unless you're using a right-angled plug.

X20 Interface and Controls
Controls for the X20 are rather simplistic, and practically identical to Best Buy's Insignia MP3 player. Besides the hold switch on the top edge of the player, there's a power button and a main menu button to the side of the screen, as well as a scrolling click wheel with a center button between the two. Surrounding the white ring of the click wheel is a piece of translucent plastic with raised edges to provide traction for your thumb as it drags across the wheel that also lights up when the controls are in use. The wheel is ratcheted, so it's hard to over-scroll past an item. Unfortunately despite the raised edges, it's still hard to maintain traction when scrolling fast, and because there's no accelerated scrolling like there is in the iPod nano or iriver clix, moving through long lists can be a long, frustrating experience. On the plus side, at least the menus are well laid out and easy to navigate, and the display can be flipped for left handed use.

Getting acquainted with the controls involves a bit of a learning curve, mostly due to the years of reinforcement from remote controls and other MP3 players that the center button represents Select. Well, with the iriver X20, it doesn't. In the center menu it will act as the select button, but in every other menu after that it takes the currently highlighted item and starts playing it or adds it to the now playing list. To move into the next sub-menu or go back, you'll need to click left and right on the wheel respectively. Moving up and down through the list is handled by scrolling, and cannot be handled by clicking.

In the now playing screen, the up and down clicks of the wheel become usable, revealing the Now Playing list in order, as well as activating the A-B repeat function for hearing the intro riff to Smoke on the Water a million times before spontaneously combusting. An odd thing to note here is that when the iriver X20 is in shuffle mode, pressing back on the wheel will actually advance the track instead of replaying the previous song. Holding left or right while in the now playing screen will seek through the track as expected, although yet again the fast forward / rewind acceleration is sorely missed, especially when listening to podcasts.

When placed into MSC mode, the X20 is meant to be synchronized with the bundled iriver plus 3 software, although thankfully this is not required. Granted it plays music, offers firmware upgrades and built-in video conversion, but does none of them particularly well. The latest firmware according to iriver plus 3 is version 1.02, when in reality it's actually v1.04. Music ripped from CDs can only be encoded as WMA or OGG, album art is thumbnail sized, and there's no visualizer, mini-remote, smart playlists or streaming radio.

As an alternative, users may download the standalone iriver Firmware Updater to update firmware, iriver Movie Converter for batch converting movies to WMV, and practically any jukebox software to organize and transfer their music. Like the clix, the iriver X20 has the ability to rebuild its own internal library after synchronization, so it's still possible to browse songs by Album, Artist, Song, or Genre even if they weren't synchronized using WMP or iriver plus 3.

As such, even Winamp or iTunes junkies (using the iTunes Agent plugin) can get their kicks. Unlike the clix, this occurs automatically every time the X20 is unplugged from the computer, so while you don't have to manually activate anything, it can take a few seconds before the X20 is ready to go. This freedom to choose your own operating system and software without consequences is something that more MP3 player manufacturers should strive for.

X20 Music Playback
The iriver X20 handles your typical variety of music, including WMA, MP3, and OGG Vorbis. Subscription music support and Audible audio book downloads however, are not supported, although individually purchased tracks from stores like Napster, URGE and Yahoo! will work. And while not necessarily outside of the norm, the lack of AAC support does hurt those such as myself whose libraries have a hefty dose of content encoded in that format for other devices that do support it (iPod, Zune, Walkman, Sonos, PS3, PSP, cell phones).

Album art as well as standard, and on the go playlists are all supported by the X20, but unfortunately a number of features commonly found on other iriver players are notably absent including song ratings, playback speed, and LDB lyrics display. While I personally don't use the playback speed or lyrics display functions enough on other players to consider it a major loss, I do lament the lack of ratings.

The bundled earphones sound slightly tinny, but acceptable for most music. Plugging the iriver X20 into a high end set of earphones and my car stereo system revealed amazing audio quality, even when left on the Normal preset mode. While not as clean and powerful as the built-in speakers found on Samsung's YP-K5, the iriver X20's speakers provided ample volume and clarity for listening at a short distance, great for listening to tunes when working in the kitchen or having your friends sample the latest tracks.

For those that like to fiddle with Equalizers however, there are only four EQ presets to choose from: Rock, Jazz, Classic, and Pops. This is offset by the 5-band custom equalizer, which made up for the awkward sounding Rock preset. To mark another usual iriver feature not found in the X20, SRS WOW is missing, although thanks to the custom EQ I can live without this.

iriver rates the X20 for 22 hours when using MP3s encoded at 128kbps at volume level 20 (out of 40). In my more realistic testing of MP3s encoded with mixed bitrates varying between 128 and 192kbps at volume level 25, I attained only 17 hours. This is enough to get me through the day, but not as close to the official rating as I'm accustomed to seeing with other players when using the same testing method. When using the built-in speakers at volume level 25, playtime is a hearty 8.5 hours.

Radio and Recording
FM radio reception on the iriver X20 is superb, able to play nearly all of the local Columbus-area stations while in a basement on the outskirts of town. Like most players, the earphones double as antennas, so you'll need to leave them plugged in (thus disabling the speakers) in order to get the best signal. Without earphones, the X20 is still able to receive a clean stereo signal from more powerful stations using its internal antenna, but it will need to be positioned on the desk just right. Up to 20 presets can be manually programmed by clicking the play/pause button while in the FM screen, but most people will be content letting the X20 do all the work by selecting Auto Preset in the settings menu.

Holding down play/pause in the FM menu will start manually recording to MP3 in one of three quality levels: 128kbps, 96kbps, and 64kbps. Unfortunately scheduled recordings are not possible, as iriver chose not to include an alarm clock in this model - a true shame because I'd love to wake up to MP3s in the morning through the built-in speakers like I did with the video-less Samsung YP-K5.

Other clips may be captured in the Recordings menu by clicking the play/pause button via the built-in microphone located next to the controls, or the Line-In jack. Line-in recordings are also encoded as MP3s at 128, 96 and 64kbps with the ability to boost the volume, while voice recordings through the microphone are encoded as 32kbps WAVs. Voices captured from the built-in microphone were a bit muffled but on par with other MP3 players, and sensitivity was also average - unless someone is speaking in a presenter's voice, you'll only be able to capture voices from less than 2 meters away.

Pictures and Video
Like most flash-based MP3 players available these days, iriver's X20 has the ability to showcase non-progressive JPG photos, and while I was pleased to see the ability to zoom in on the finer details of each photo, I was disappointed that picture selection was text-based only, with no thumbnail previews to quickly find an image. Slideshows are also unsupported. Picture quality itself was rather impressive for the TFT display, with vibrant colors and smooth transitions between darker shades, although the colors didn't pop out as much as they did on the clix 2's AMOLED display. The only image degradation I noticed were some jaggies when viewing photos larger than 320x240 that needed to be resized by the X20.

Video playback was superb, able to display 30 frames per second for delightfully smooth motion even during the most intense action sequences. The quality was on par with the 2nd generation clix - in fact the X20 was able to play the same videos I transcoded for the earlier review. Supported formats include WMV encoded at 512kbps with 128kbps WMA audio, or MPEG4 SP, also at 512kbps with 128kbps MP3 audio. These settings may introduce a few blocky moments, but for the most part the video itself is clean when viewed on the player's 2.2" screen. The screen size is adequate for viewing short clips or TV shows, but I wouldn't recommend using it to watch a feature length movie.

The easiest way to get movies on the X20 is to either use iriver plus 3, or preferably use the iriver Movie Converter software available on iriveramerica.com, both of which only work on Windows. Alternatively, Mac, Linux, and Windows users can use the freeware 3rd party iriverter software to convert videos individually, by folders, or even straight from a DVD. Battery life when watching high quality video is officially rated at 6 hours; I managed to get 6 hours and 10 minutes when viewing King Kong in a loop at 25 volume.

Synchronization Speeds
Transferring files to the X20 8GB is rather fast, as a high quality rip of Peter Jackson's King Kong (688MB) only took 1m:39s to transfer to the 8GB player. This breaks down to 55.6Mbps, just over 40% faster than iriver's new clix (39.4Mbps), and above average for most other MP3 players.

Music transfers were a bit slower, taking 1h:9m:47s to completely fill up the iriver X20 to its internal capacity via Windows Media Player 11 over MTP (7.31GB, 1404 songs). This averages out to 14.5Mbps, again faster than the new clix, but you'll still want to break for some coffee if you're loading the player from scratch. Since most people don't transfer 7GB of music each morning though, this shouldn't pose a major issue.

Recap
In the end I was left with somewhat mixed feelings about the iriver X20. On one hand it's a great down-to-business player with excellent sound and video quality, plus it has several refreshing qualities that aren't found on many other players including its built-in speakers, line-in jack, removable battery, and MicroSD expansion.

On the other hand the dark, slow interface feels very foreign in contrast to iriver's usual cheery, customizable interface that take mere seconds to navigate, and it can feel rather awkward to use the player with one hand. Toss in the lack of subscription music and other iriver staple features (where's the alarm clock?!), and the X20 eventually boils down to superior hardware without any charm to it. If iriver really did license the interface from another company, they certainly did not do much to make it their own.

By Scott Clark, Consumer Technology Editor