iRiver T30: More Than A Basic Music PlayeriRiver T30: More Than A Basic Music Player

The iRiver T30 is testimony that, the more you shrink things down, the more usability sacrifices you have to make. This flash music player is inexpensive, almost weightless and comes with support for PlaysForSure subscription services such as Napster and Yahoo! Unlimited. It sounds great!

However, it also is maddening to use at times, mostly because of usability compromises required to make the device so small. Still, its more annoying features are the type you eventually get used to, so this is an easy music player to recommend.

The Good

At first glance, the iRiver T30 is typical of the recent flood of low-end flash music players. At $99 for the 512 MB version I tested (a 1GB version also is available for $149), this device is typically priced and provides more functionality than the iPod Shuffle. Also like other low-end flash players, this one uses an AAA battery instead of a built-in rechargeable battery and has a meager four-line monochrome display.

Despite those similarities, the T30 has some strong advantages over similar low-end players.

Most important, the sound quality is excellent. Out of the box, the sound was flat and uninteresting. But it didn't take much tweaking of the SRS WOW sound quality settings before the sound became warm and rich. Particularly impressive was bass response, which was unusually solid for a small music player.

In addition, the device supports playlists created in Windows Media player, a seeming no-brainer of a feature that is nonetheless missing from a surprising number of inexpensive players. The form factor also has some strong positives. It weighs one ounce, without the battery and is about as wide as the Shuffle, but it's shorter and deeper. In all, the form factor makes the T30 extremely easy to carry.

The device supports a fair variety of formats -- MP3, OGG and WMA. Also, this is one of the few low-price players (so far) that comes with built-in support for music subscription services. Support by devices for these services has been painfully slow to materialize, a problem that obviously will rectify itself over time. Still, the T30 has that support now and, in my test, it worked flawlessly with Yahoo! Unlimited right out of the box.

The Bad

While I liked the T30's size, shape and weight, iRiver did a poor job making this device usable. It placed three control buttons above the display and three below. This is problematic because, when you hold the device in such a way to press one of those six buttons, it's natural to also inadvertently press the button on the opposite side of the display. When I first started using the device, this design flaw led to frequently turning off the player by mistake or inadvertently moving to the previous or next song.

Making matters worse, the markings on the buttons are embossed but not colored differently then the buttons themselves. Since the buttons are necessarily small, it is difficult to see the function of the button. As a result, the couple of hours it took to get used to operating the T30. In fairness, once I got used to these design issues, I had little trouble.

The T30's music management capabilities are more troubling. You can't select music by artist or CD unless you download a specific folder from your PC, which is clumsy, particularly for subscription music. Ultimately, I found two workarounds: creating a playlist for each subscription CD then uploading the playlist and songs via the Yahoo! Unlimited software or using Windows Explorer to transfer entire directories of music. It would be far preferable, however, to be able to select specific artists or CDs directly from the menus.

Similarly, it was clumsy to perform some simple functions such as selecting the play mode. That particular set of options is buried in the menu structure and, when you find it, it's impossible to know which option to select because the options don't have obvious names like "Shuffle." Rather, the options have letters like A, B and C -- you have to consult the user manual to discern which of those options is the one you want. Until you memorize what all the options mean, you'll likely only switch play modes when you're near the user manual.

A final gripe relates to battery life. The company claims that the T30 is rated for as long as 24 hours on a single AAA battery, but I never saw anything close to that. Connecting the device to a PC via the USB cable, a power drainer on any device, sucked more juice out of the T30's battery than I'd experienced previously. When I first started using the T30, I had it connected via the USB cable longer than ordinarily would be the case and got about four hours of play time. With the next battery, I connected several times just briefly enough to transfer music, but I still only got about 10 hours of play time.

The battery issue is typical of the problems with the iRiver T30 -- it's annoying but not fatal. In fact, given the sound quality, form factor and instant compatibility with subscription services, the T30 is easy to recommend.