Skip to content

New Toy – iRiver H10 Jr

New Toy

Couldn’t come back empty-handed from COMEX now, could I?

I’ve recently started listening to podcasts and audiobooks along with music – which means a player with no screen and playlist options (like my old Shuffle) was becoming a pain. I had to either exclusively put one type of content, or blindly search around to find what I needed to hear.

So I ended up getting this little beauty which has all that I need, and more. I did consider the iPod nano and the Zen V Plus from Creative. The latter was out of stock at Creative, and I had no inkling of Linux support. The Nano has just too few features (or rather you purchase most of the features – like the Apple Remote w/ radio separately).

This thing does radio, voice recording, text reading, photo display and actually plays OGG files, a huge plus for me. The interface and looks are quite decent, and the thing is actually pretty small in size (see here). Sounds phenomenal, as good or better than the Shuffle.

The Linux story goes like this. The thing mounts as a USB Mass Storage device, and it has directories for Music, Pictures, Text etc. You put music files in the music directory. The interface has a “browser” mode in which you can simply go to any folder and load the file that you want. However, to get support for the standard Artist/Album/Genre interface on the Music menu, you need to generate a database in the System folder. Some nice folks have written a nice program that does this. Pretty cool.

6 Comments