LAS VEGAS -- Some of iRiver's products at this year's Consumer Electronics Show are available only in the company's native Korea, so we asked the company to show us its best stateside portable media players for '09.
The iRiver SPINN player (right) introduced at last year's CES, with its innovative navigation controls, is still the company's flagship product and with good reason. Not since the original iPod scrollwheel have we seen such a leap forward in portable media player controls. Twist the spinner control to scroll through menus and media; click it down to select.
Other than that, all you need to control the player is the Back button located in an easy-to-reach spot on the top of its chassis. Oh yeah, you can also forgo the spinner control and control everything using the bright AMOLED touchscreen.
iRiver plans to roll out more players with the spinner control in Korea, so options could increase in the US, but testing the SPINN just now, we didn't see much room for improvement. It handle audio, video, text, images, DMB (picks up a digital
TV signal outside of the US) and Flash games, and supports Bluetooth
2.0 for wireless headphones and streaming to certain car and home stereos. The device costs $189 for the 4GB version or $229 for the 8GB version.
Then there's the updated LPlayer, which now comes with a little speaker that slides on to the back to provide fairly quiet sound that we could barely hear on the noisy CES show floor. This player also features innovative navigation: the four-way clickable screen first spotted on the iRiver Clix. The L Player is available in 4GB ($89) and 8GB ($119).
Here's the two-inch, clickable screen:
And here it is with the included slide-on speaker accessory:
Last but not least, we checked out the MPlayer Eyes model, made in conjunction with Disney to look somewhat like a certain mouse. This year's model doubles the memory capacity to 2GB and features eyes that glow:
