Yet another MP3 player from yet another company, but this time it’s something vibrant that will undoubtedly get your senses back in action. We have all heard of iRiver, the makers of some of the most professional and sleek looking portable audio players with usually great audio quality. Let us start by mentioning that iRiver’s focus with the T10 series is fashion, fashion and more fashion. It’s not that its other products aren’t fashionable, which they are. But this time around, iRiver went with a sportier design in addition to eye-catching colors for the hi-tech appeal.

Since we are on the subject of hi-tech and fruity colors, let us first mention that iRiver’s T10 series comes in lime green, cherry red and orange yellow colors. Fruity, indeed...The player looks fairly clean from the exterior (layout wise). The microphone is situated towards the far left end of the faceplate while the color screen is located in the middle with the standard set of buttons integrated on the right side. One of the other interesting aspects of the player is the tagged clip at the top of the MP3 player. This has to be the only player in the market with something of that sort, and according to iRiver, with the support from the handle, you can clip the iRiver T10 on clothes, bags and just about anywhere else.

The color screen features a 65K color screen with battery life up to 53 hours, which is nothing short of miraculous considering the audio/video formats the T10 supports. Not to mention that the T10 only requires a single AA battery to operate. Now that’s an amazing achievement, but here’s the condition. You would only get 53 hours of battery life if you follow these specifications when listening to music: MP3, 128kbps, 44.1kHz, EQ Normal, Vol 20, LCD Off. Of course, in the 53 hours, there’s no video or photo slideshows. Clearly, the battery life will drop significantly once you start utilizing such power consuming features.

The player is USB 2.0 compliant for faster transfer speeds with 10 preset equalizer options, customizable user equalizer options and SRS WOW technology for audio quality enhancement. You also get voice and FM recording functionalities with the iRiver T10 series. The photo/video/audio player supports MP3, WMA, ASF, OGG, MPEG 1, 2, 2.5 and BMP formats. The iRiver T10 is one of the few, if not the only, portable audio player in the market to support BMP photo file format. This would allow for high-resolution images, but at only 24-bit depth. That said, unfortunately, iRiver T10 doesn’t support anything but BMP. Therefore, you would have to convert your images from the popular JPEG format to BMP if you want to view them on the player.

Although the Korean and other versions of the same player support both Windows XP and Mac OS X, the U.S. and European editions are Windows XP with Multimedia Player 10 exclusive.

Even though the availability of the T10 series is limited, it’s currently being retailed for $130.00 for the 512MB version at certain online retailers.

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