iriver X20

The bass lacks thump though. At higher volumes, boosted bass results in jarring the output. I thought this was the problem with the earphones, as I've seen in many available players in the market. We tried the X20 with the Sennheiser PXC 450, and the jarring was still there. The earphones provided with the player as quite good to begin with. After a rather extended session of bitching about bad quality earphones being dished out with MP3 players, the X20 earphones are truly a relief.

While playing songs, the player doesn’t allow you to back in to the song folders. You can go as far as the album or the song you are currently listening to. You will need to access the main menu and retrace your path to switch albums.

The X20 does a pretty bad job of playing videos though. To begin with, you will need WMP11 to synchronize and convert video files. This isn’t bad at all. But WMP11 kept failing at converting any of the movie clips we tried. The player only supports MPEG 4 (simple profile) and WMV. But the catch here is that all videos need to be less than 30 fps, 512 kbps. If this isn’t bad enough, we even tried converting some files to less than 30 fps, and the player still failed to read any.

Also there is no possible way to get rid of the error message while trying to play a non-compatible video file. The player just hangs. You will need to take the battery out and put it back in. To avoid this you will need to synchronize the files using WMP11.

The recording feature of the X20 is quite good. You can either use the voice-in or the line-in to record. What I like here, is that the media gets stored as .MP3, and what I hate is that instead of smart selecting the medium you will need to manually select Voice-in or line-in from settings.

The FM reception of the player is pretty good too. It took about 12 seconds to scan and save the available stations. The reception was quite clear even indoors and also while traveling in the trains. You also have the option to record FM.