Spin on Iriver SPINN

Never been a fan of iRiver, the Korean flashplayer iPod wannabe company. Whilst their designs have been quite nice in the past, the user interface on their smaller flash players has been truly awful. Only geeks could operate the dam things. Added to that their European sales office has no clue on how to work with journalists. Now Engadget is showing the new iRiver Spin, though they don't seem to be making much of the DMB capability on the new player. That's cause DMB isn't rolling out in the US I guess.

The prices are outrageous in the US - bearing in mind the cost of flash memory these days. We get 4GB (US$249.99) and 8GB (US$289.99) varieties. The 4GB version looks outdated before it launches...you can't sell a player with that kind of memory these days. The device has a 3.3-inch, 480 x 272 AMOLED display, support for MP3, WMA, OGG, APE, FLAC, AVI, and WMV files, DMB tuner (in the US, FM I guess), and Bluetooth 2.0. No support for Mac (or AAC files), and perhaps more importantly, won't work with iTunes.

So nice design, but watch for it in the remaindered section of Curry's/Dixons at the start of next year. Its the wrong mix of technologies at clearly the wrong price.