Created: 07 Feb 2006
The irivers are, in my experience, a nicely engineered series of portable music players. They support a variety of media formats, including Ogg Vorbis, generally come with more storage than the equivalent iPods and often an FM tuner and other goodies. So, iriver should be quietly selling units, not challenging Apple directly, but at least putting some downwards pressure on prices.
But Apple needn’t worry in the slightest, because iriver suffers from one crippling flaw; their software is absolutely appalling. Iriver Plus takes something that is inherently quite simple and proceeds to make it as awkward as possible. For a start, in order to use the software with XP Service Pack 2 installed you must be an administrator. The solution on their website is to remove Service Pack 2.
So once we’ve given administrator access to all users who wish to use iriver plus you discover that it can only be run by the same user that installed it. Until, that is, you’ve spent a few hours messing out with regmon and importing registry keys. Finally, it’s time to transfer some music from a CD. So, in goes the CD and then you have to try and work out how to stop it playing the CD and actually transfer the data onto your iriver. The software wants the music first to be transferred to the “music library” on the PC. So, once we’ve grasped that and found the slightly obscure icon for doing that we need to wait until it has finished transferring thhe files, before you can finally transfer the music to the player.
I think the fundamental message for iriver here is “don’t make it difficult for people to use your products”. Don’t make me remove service packs to use your software. If I stick an audio CD in a drive and open your software application, it’s a pretty good hint that I want to transfer the data to the iriver. - not play it, or try to remember which wierd shape represented “transfer to music library” in the warped mind of your UI designer.